


Footnote

by nikkiRA



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, M/M, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-15 11:10:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18072320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikkiRA/pseuds/nikkiRA
Summary: In 1945, Steve Rogers fell off a train. Two weeks later, Bucky Barnes, dressed as Captain America, crashed a plane in the Arctic.Seventy years later Bucky Barnes wakes up to a new world. The problem, of course, is that everyone Bucky knew and loved is dead, and everyone still thinks he's Captain America. So Bucky has to navigate the new century while pretending he's the national icon everyone loves, trying to ignore the fact that he's lonely, still in love with his best friend, and starting to lose sense of who he is. Then a mysterious masked figure called the Winter Soldier appears, and everything Bucky thinks he knows is flipped upside down.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I did it, somehow. I thought this might be the fic that killed me, but I did it. 
> 
> Thank you to my betas, Luxanee, Taja, and Talli, and to my artists, blue-reveries, gigglepud, and Talli. 
> 
> [Here is the amazing artwork by blue-reveries!](https://blue-reveries.tumblr.com/post/183378251447/art-for-aravenlikeawritingdesks-lovely) it's also linked at the bottom to a separate ao3 work, please make sure you go give kudos to my amazing artist!
> 
> Beautiful work by [gigglepud here, I was so blessed with artists this bang](http://gigglepud.tumblr.com/post/183379641097/there-were-no-photos-of-him-of-the-real-him-of)
> 
> And amazing artwork [by Talli here!](http://hoozoo.tumblr.com/post/183437001678/the-winter-soldier-hesitated-eyes-narrowed-on-the)

He remembered ... water. 

A lot of water, an ocean of water. No, wait. A literal ocean. The goddamn North Atlantic, speeding up at him.   
  
He had closed his eyes. It was easy to be a coward when there was no one there to see.    
  
Okay, so then why was – he was not in the water. Was he dead? Was this heaven? Would he even be allowed in, or would St. Peter stop him at the gate, make him watch a reel of every man dead by his hands before banishing him to burn?   
  
He became aware of voices in the background. It sounded like a radio broadcast. Okay, it was definitely a radio broadcast, and it sounded like baseball. He listened harder.    
  
Something was wrong. He sat up, and the door opened.    
  
“Captain Rogers?”   
  
Something was very wrong.    
  
“Where am I?”   
  
“You’re in a recovery room in New York City.”

She was lying, he was almost sure of it. Something wasn’t right about this entire situation. The radio was a dead giveaway, and there was something… off, about her, something he couldn’t quite place. If it had just been her he could have convinced himself that it was a strange war filled with strange things, but the combination of the two -- something was wrong.   
  
“Where am I, really?” he said, giving her the option to come clean. He trusted his instincts. They had kept him alive this far, even if he hadn’t always asked them to.   
  
She feigned ignorance. “I don’t understand.”   
  
“The game,” he explained impatiently. “It’s from 1941. I know, because I was there.”   
  
He stood up, ready to demand more information, but he saw some kind of remote in her hand, saw her press one of its buttons. “Captain Rogers –” she said, just as two men burst into the room behind her.    
  
Bucky ran. 

He had never been one for running, but it was really his only option. Whoever these assholes were -- and he assumed they were HYDRA with really fucking phenomenal American accents -- they had somehow managed to drag him out of the wreck of the Valkyrie and bring him back to wherever he was. He didn’t buy this New York shit. He  _ knew  _ New York. Being in New York brought a comfort and familiarity that he was not feeling. All he was feeling right now was panic and anger. 

He had been ready to die. How dare they take that from him?

He was so focused on his panic and his anger and his running that it took him a bit for his brain to process what he was seeing. At first he thought it was another trick, like the bullshit-room they had had him in, but the more he ran and the more he saw, the more it was… familiar, in the worst sense of the word. Like the way he had felt when he saw a reflection of himself for the first time after Azzano, the eerie way he had looked so similar when he felt so irrevocably changed. He didn’t recognize it, but he knew it. 

He stopped. He knew it would probably end in his death, but he couldn’t bring himself to run anymore, not with everything around him. Not with what he was seeing. 

It was bright. Bright, and colourful, and  _ loud,  _ and there were films that seemed to be playing on nearly every surface. There were cars, too, but they were nothing like the cars Bucky knew, nothing like the one his folks had had, and they were  _ everywhere.  _ As he stopped in the middle of the street and gawked, he was surrounded by several black cars. The people that stepped out started controlling the crowd; they all carried weapons. 

A man with an eyepatch stepped forward. He was clearly some sort of authority; Bucky could tell just from the way he held himself, from the way he approached so confidently, from the way he looked Bucky in the eye.

Bucky didn’t trust him. 

“At ease, soldier,” he called out. Bucky did not feel at ease. If anything, he tensed up more. “Look, I’m sorry about that little show back there.” He didn’t sound sorry at all. “We thought it best to break it to you slowly.”

“Break what?”

“You’ve been asleep, Cap. For almost seventy years.”

As big of a shock that this was, it wasn’t actually that hard to understand. Bucky looked at the world around him and decided this man probably wasn’t lying.

“You gonna be okay?”

Was he? Was he going to be okay? Seventy years and two weeks ago he had lost his best friend. Seventy years and two hours ago he had put a plane in the ocean to save the world. He had closed his eyes and accepted death, knowing it was what Steve would have done. And he had been okay. He had been ready. 

Ready to see Steve again. 

_ Steve.  _

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

She had done it. Peggy had done it, she had rewritten history, just like he’d asked, except he had asked that under the impression that he was about to  _ die.  _ This -- being alive -- that changed things. He couldn’t let them think he was Steve. 

Except... except. Except they didn’t want Bucky Barnes, they wanted Captain America. What would they do if they found out that the body they pulled from the ice wasn’t the hero they had grown up knowing? And what would have been the point of all of Peggy’s work, all of Bucky’s work, all of Steve’s work? They had wanted to keep Steve alive, wanted to give him the death he deserved, wanted the world to know him for the hero he was. All of that would have been for nothing if Bucky told them now.    
  
There was also the question of how would they react, anyway, these people around him, if they found out that the hero they had likely spent so many resources on, pulling from the ice, wasn’t a hero after all? It wouldn’t be fair to them, wouldn’t be fair to Steve --  _ Steve,  _ who had given his life for Bucky. Steve, who would have been here if Bucky had been quicker. Bucky owed him this. Bucky owed him everything. He couldn’t disrespect everything Steve was, everything he had done. He had died so Steve could live. 

“Cap?”

He looked back at the man. “Sorry,” he said, although realistically he had nothing to apologize for. “I was just… looking forward to seeing someone.”

* * *

He dreamed of it. He always dreamed of it.

It had happened in the Alps. It had been Bucky’s fault. It was just, well, someone had been shooting at him, and the shield was right there. The problem hadn’t been that it was too heavy, but that it was too light. He didn’t know how to balance it. That had been the problem. So he fell. 

Or he should have. But Steve -- Steve, stupid, impulsive, loyal Steve. He had grabbed Bucky, flung him back in the train car, and Bucky had watched as Steve had wavered, lost his balance, and fell. 

And fell. 

And fell.

Time had slowed, and Bucky had always thought that was bullshit, but it was true. He had seen Steve lose balance, saw him fall out of the side of the train, saw him reach out wildly and grab the rail, but Bucky knew it wouldn’t hold him, not the way he was now. He had a brief thought of Steve before, the way he used to be, small, not even a hundred pounds. That Steve, the Steve he knew, the one he had loved before everyone else loved him, that Steve would be fine, could be held up by one rickety rail. But Steve wasn’t like that anymore, and if he were still like that he wouldn’t be here, and neither would Bucky, but Steve would have been  _ safe,  _ at least. Bucky would have been willing to die on that table in Azzano if it meant Steve was safe in Brooklyn. 

“Steve!” he yelled, and he followed, because that’s what he  _ did,  _ he followed Steve, grabbing the side of the train and reaching out. “Steve, grab my hand, come on.”

Bucky tried, he did. Stretched his arm out as far as he could, felt his muscles groan in agony. He would tear himself apart if he had to, to get to Steve. 

Steve met his eyes. They were blue, more blue than Bucky had ever seen. Bright with tears. 

The rail fell. So did Steve. 

In the dream, Bucky did what he should have done. He jumped right after him. 

What had really happened was Morita had grabbed him, hauled him back and valiantly pretended not to notice the tears. The wretched, stupid shield was lying on the floor of the train. Bucky wanted to throw it, send it after Steve into the abyss. 

He picked it up instead. 


	2. Part One

He was pretty sure he had SHIELD’s number. 

It went something like this: find a celebrated war hero who had sacrificed his life for a cause. Set him to defrost. From the very start, lie to him. Act as if this is for his best interest. 

Ask him to fight. Make it seem like he has a choice. When he says no, tell him fine, but he has to stay close. For safety, for security, for his own good. 

Give him an apartment. Tell him he can decorate it however he’d like. Don’t give him anything he can decorate it with. 

Give him a file of all his old friends, with big red letters spelling DECEASED across the top. Give him a file with the name  _ Peggy Carter  _ and the word RETIRED. Tell him they can’t let him see her, that he doesn’t have the clearance, that he doesn’t really have a birth certificate or a passport, that he is still sort of dead. 

Isolate him. Make him wish they’d never pulled him from the water. 

Find him again. Tell him the thing he’d died trying to bury had been found and used for decades. Tell him a real, actual god had taken it. Show him that the world is much bigger than he’d originally thought, but he’s still completely alone in it.

Call him Steve Rogers, call him Cap, until he forgets that’s not who he is. 

No, he couldn’t blame SHIELD for that. That was all on him. 

Fury had sought him out, found him beating the shit out of a punching bag. Boxing made him feel like himself again, even though he wasn’t entirely sure who that was anymore. He had boxed a lot before the war; it let him get some of his anger out, some of his frustrations, and occasionally it even gave them some extra pocket money. The army had given him some pamphlet after Azzano, saying that using a punching bag was a good solution for anxiety, but Bucky, frankly, hadn’t had the time back then. Now he had nothing  _ but  _ time, and he had to admit that beating the shit out of multiple punching bags was pretty satisfying. 

Fury had come to recruit him again, even though Bucky had kept turning him down. He had had no interest in fighting for SHIELD. Bucky hadn’t even wanted to fight in the fucking war. He certainly didn’t want to fight for the idiots who had rudely brought him back to life. 

And then Fury had said one word: Tesseract. 

Bucky whirled on him. “What do you mean, Tesseract?”

“Howard Stark fished it out of the ocean when he was looking for you,” Fury said. “He thought what we think, the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That’s something the world sorely needs.”

Bucky unwrapped his hands, trying not to show that he was shaking. “No,” he said fiercely. “Whatever the world needs, it isn’t that.”

“What can you tell me about it?”

“You should have left it in the  _ goddamn ocean.” _

When he met Phil Coulson, he knew he was going to be the biggest problem. Bucky could tell from the minute Coulson told him he had watched him sleep, although as someone who had spent a decent amount of his life watching Steve Rogers sleep, Bucky figured he didn’t really have a leg to stand on. 

It was there that Coulson showed him Bruce Banner. 

“He was trying to recreate the serum used on you,” Coulson said. “As you can see, it didn’t work.”

Bucky watched the giant green monster rip apart a Jeep as if it were a piece of paper. He handed Coulson the tablet back. 

“They should leave it alone,” he said. “Nothing good will come from trying to make another super soldier.” 

Coulson looked like he wasn’t sure what to say to this. Bucky felt a little bad for him; this was a man who had grown up idolizing Captain America, and here Captain America was, being a jackass. But Bucky couldn’t help it -- the serum had taken his best friend away from him, and now it had turned this doctor into a monster. Playing God never ended well -- it ended at the bottom of a ravine. 

“We’ve, uh…” Coulson cleared his throat. “We’ve made some modifications to the uniform. I had a little design input.”

Bucky looked at him sharply. “The uniform? You don’t mean the stars and stripes, do you? It’s a little… old fashioned.”

Coulson smiled a little shyly. Bucky could tell he was excited and was trying not to geek out too much. “With everything that’s happening, the things that are about to come to light, people might just need a little old fashioned.”

Bucky wasn’t entirely sure if he agreed with this statement, and he  _ definitely  _ wasn’t super thrilled that the uniform was coming back. His thing with the uniform was simple: just because he had wanted to peel it off of Steve with his teeth didn’t mean it wasn’t utterly ridiculous. There was a pretty big part of Bucky that wanted to tell Coulson that he wasn’t a goddamn museum exhibit, that he wanted an actual outfit and not the American flag draped all over him -- but that was  _ Bucky.  _ He wasn’t Bucky, not anymore, he was Steve Rogers, and Bucky knew Steve Rogers, knew exactly what he would have done in this situation. 

He nodded, smiled, and said thank you. 

They hadn’t given him a gun, because Captain America didn’t use guns. That’s what their legends said, and they weren’t completely wrong. Steve had carried a gun, mostly at Bucky’s insistence, because it was fucking war, and  _ what are you planning to do if you meet Hitler, throw your shield at him?  _ But he hadn’t really used it, and he had never really needed to. Bucky had always had his six, until the day he didn’t. 

The end result was he felt like an idiot and he looked like an idiot. He had a brief thought that he was almost glad that it was him, that he was sparing Steve the tragedy of running around New York in the world’s biggest affront to fashion, looking like a Star Spangled Idiot. 

When he got to the giant floating fucking submarine in the sky -- proving once again that SHIELD had more money than was really necessary -- he was introduced to Dr. Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff. Dr. Banner, despite the fact that he had tried to reproduce the thing that had ruined Bucky’s life, was a quiet, well-mannered man; Natasha Romanoff… well, Bucky didn’t really know what to think about Natasha Romanoff. He was pretty sure that’s how she wanted it.

They were led inside the big not-submarine (Bucky will later be told that it’s something called a Helicarrier), where a bunch of people were doing a bunch of things on a bunch of screens. Fury walked over and shook Banner’s hand.

“Doctor, thank you for coming.”

Banner looked like he hadn’t had much choice in the manner. “Thank you for asking nicely,” he said, proving Bucky’s suspicion right. “Uh, how long am I staying?”

“Once we get our hands on the Tesseract, you’re in the clear.”

Banner nodded. “Where are you with that?”

Fury turned towards Coulson, who answered. “We're sweeping every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. Cell phones, laptops. If it's connected to a satellite, it's eyes and ears for us.”

Bucky was only vaguely aware of what most of those things were, but he still had a feeling that those perimeters were too wide. Romanoff appeared to feel the same. 

“That’s still not gonna find them in time,” she said, turning away from where she had been staring at a picture of Agent Barton on the screen. 

“You have to narrow the field,” Banner said. “How many spectrometers do you have access to?”

“How many are there?” Fury asked.

“Call every lab you know, tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places.”

Bucky came up behind Banner, watching as he fiddled with the screens. “That is… so cool,” he mumbled. He must have been louder than he had planned, or maybe Banner had gotten some kind of advanced hearing with the serum mix up, because he gave him an appreciative look.

“I didn’t think that this would really be up your alley, given that none of it really existed when you went into the ice.”

“That’s exactly why it’s up my alley,” he said, watching Banner’s fingers fly over the screens. “When I went down, we had only just discovered penicillin. I wake up and suddenly everyone has phones in their pockets, and there’s a cure for almost everything, you can find someone from half a world away, and we’re on the  _ moon.  _ It’s incredible.”

Banner smiled. It was the first time he had looked comfortable. “I’d love to show you some of the stuff I’m working on when the situation isn’t quite so life threatening.”

Bucky grinned back. “That would be incredible, Doctor. Thank you.”

“If you two are done flirting,” Natasha said with a smirk. “I can show you to your lab, Doctor Banner.”

* * *

They located Loki in Germany, which was just a little too on the nose. 

Fighting came easily to him, another reminder of the ugly things inside him, that fighting was the only thing he was good for. It should have come as no surprise that nearly seventy years in the ice hadn’t erased the fact that Bucky had only ever been useful with a weapon in his hand. The shield was as light as ever, but it felt heavy. He hated it. Loki was his first real fight in a long time, and he had the advantage of being a god. Bucky was rusty. Loki avoided the shield Bucky threw at him easily, and Loki was able to knock him down far easier than Bucky would have liked. Bucky had been a three-time welterweight boxing champion at the YMCA, and then he had been a science experiment for some crazy Germans. The two combined usually meant he was unstoppable, but Loki was able to flip him over so Bucky was staring up at the scepter. Bucky knocked Loki’s legs out from under him, but Loki was able to flip him so he was on his back again. 

Then the music started, and Loki was blasted right out of the sky. 

He’d already known about Tony Stark, of course. Howard’s only son, he had long ago surpassed his father’s brilliance, and if there weren’t bigger things at hand, Bucky would have loved to sit Tony Stark down and talk about some of things he was working on, ask him whether he or his father had ever ended up sorting out that mishap with the flying car. As it was, there were bigger things at hand, namely the unease he felt at how easy it had been to apprehend Loki. Tony seemed to notice his concern. 

“What are you so worried about?”

“It seemed a little easy, don’t you think? I don’t remember it ever being that simple.”

Tony simply shrugged. “Welcome to the future, Capsicle. Ha, get it. Capsicle.”

“Hilarious,” Bucky said dryly. 

He had a funny feeling that Steve wouldn’t have gotten along well with Tony. Tony had a sense of humour that wouldn’t have mixed well with Steve. Sarcastic and self-deprecating, to the outside eye it looked like Tony Stark didn’t care about anything, and Steve, the champion of caring too much, wouldn’t have meshed well with that. But Bucky understood Stark, at least more than Steve would have. Understood about protecting your heart, about trying to hide the bad shit inside of you. He had a feeling Tony knew it, too, knew that Bucky saw through him. He always seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable around him, as if Bucky had seen him naked. 

It was around then that the storm started picking up, that Loki started getting antsy. And then the fucking  _ heavens  _ opened up, and a man who seemed to be made almost entirely of muscle busted in, grabbing Loki by the throat and hauling ass out of there, Tony following right after. 

“Stark, you can’t just go after them, we need some kind of strategy --”

“This is a strategy,” Tony said, flying out into the night. Bucky watched him go. 

“What the fuck,” he muttered. 

“I wouldn’t go after them, Cap,” Natasha said. “These guys come from legends. They’re practically gods.”

The Catholic guilt inside of Bucky wanted to tell her that there was only one God, but at that point he was beginning to doubt even that. So he just said, “Go after them.”

They found the two men going absolutely apeshit on each other. “The hell is this guy?” Bucky asked. 

“If I had to guess?” She said, flying lower. “Probably Thor, Loki’s brother. SHIELD’s had eyes on him ever since last year when he came to earth. He has a girlfriend here. Nice girl.”

“Loki’s brother. That makes him… bad?”

“Him and Loki got into it last time. I don’t think they exactly see eye to eye. I’d say Thor probably wants to bring Loki back to Asgard to punish him there.”

“Maybe you should set up an Asgardian consulate,” Bucky suggested. “Might make things easier.” Natasha shot him a look that said she wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. It was a powerful feeling. 

“He can have Loki,” Bucky said. “We just need the Tesseract.”

“If those two don’t stop they’re going to kill each other, and then we’ll have neither.”

Bucky considered the scene below him. “Get me as low as you can,” he said to Natasha. 

Just as Thor and Tony stood up to face each other again, Bucky launched the shield. It hit Thor and then Tony before flying back to him.

“Nice shot,” Natasha said appreciatively. 

“That’s enough,” he said, wincing at how much he sounded like his mother when she had yelled at him and his sisters. “Whose side are you on?” He asked, directing this at Thor. 

“I’ve come here to put an end to Loki’s schemes!”

“Which means we’re on the same side, which means we’re wasting a lot of goddamn energy fighting each other instead of dealing with Loki.”

“Are you allowed to swear?” Tony looked at Thor, as if the alien they had just met would be able to answer. “Is he allowed to swear?”

“Are we done here?” Bucky asked. 

The three of them looked at each other, until eventually Thor nodded. 

“Good,” Bucky said. “We should maybe get the crazy mass murderer under control.”

Natasha nodded approvingly at him when they loaded back onto the jet. “Good job, Cap,” she said. 

Bucky kind of felt like he was going to be sick. It wasn’t the first time someone had referred to him as Cap, but this, this whole team that Fury had put together to save the world… it was exactly what Steve would have wanted, would have done. Steve had done what he did because he wanted to fight against what was bad and stand on the side of good. He had been so firm in his beliefs. If other men were fighting, he should fight to. If there was a chance that Erskine’s science project could help him aid the war effort, he’d do it. He’d go on a one man suicide mission into Azzano on the off chance that Bucky might be alive, because that’s what Steve did. He saved you. It didn’t matter how big the bully was, all that mattered was that he was wrong. Steve had believed in so much; Bucky hadn’t believed in anything except Steve. A team designed to save the world was exactly what Steve would have signed up for, but the only thing Bucky had signed up for was to die 70 years ago. 

When they got Loki back, they put him in a cage that everyone knew hadn’t been built for him, but Bruce had kind eyes and didn’t mention it. Loki played games; he toyed with them, tried to set them against each other, reached into their minds and twisted. It was that more than anything that marked him as dangerous. Bucky wasn’t afraid of Loki’s army of aliens. He was afraid of Loki looking into his head and seeing him. Not just that he wasn’t Steve, but seeing who he  _ really  _ was. Bucky the coward. Bucky the fearful. The man who believed in Steve Rogers and not much else. 

He stayed far away.

* * *

When the alien invasion was over, and things had settled down, Bucky started acquainting himself with the 21st century. 

Tony was both a help and a hindrance. Bucky’s place had been destroyed in the fight, so Tony had offered him a floor -- a whole  _ floor  _ \-- at Stark Tower. Nat stayed there as well, as much as she ever stayed anywhere, and Tony had an impressive lab that was all had been needed to convince Bruce to stay. Bucky hadn’t wanted to integrate so completely with people he was lying to, but he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. 

So, Tony offering him a place to stay -- helpful. Tony offering to teach him the ways of the 21st century -- less than helpful. Occasionally he would say or do something useful, like show Bucky cool videos of scientific phenomenons, or buy him a book he thought Bucky would like, but other times he would greet him with stuff like, “Hey, Steve-o, you ever heard of long cat?” Or send him 20 minute long Youtube videos of something called the Spongebob Squarepants theme. 

Bruce, on the other hand, was actually helpful, catching Bucky up on 70 years of science. There was a lot of catching up to do. 

“This is unreal,” Bucky said, as he peered into the microscope. “Holy shit.”

“You know,” Bruce said thoughtfully, “I never would have expected you to be interested in all of this. None of the books ever mentioned an interest in science.”

It wasn’t Bruce’s fault, he knew, not really, but he still felt a wave of resentment crash over him at the idea that Steve Rogers existed more as a figure in a textbook than in real life. These people learned about Steve in school and thought that was all there was to him, a one dimensional figure you could shape however you wanted. Bucky hated it. They had taken away all the things that made him  _ Steve,  _ the anger and the stubbornness, the inability to walk away from any situation heading south. They had stripped him of all of the bad, leaving only the good, ignoring that it was the mixture of both that made a person real. They demoted him from a person to a figurehead, a pretty face they could apply to their morals. It wasn’t Bruce’s fault; Steve Rogers had only existed in a textbook for most of Bruce’s life. Name, date of birth, height and weight. No mention of science. 

Why would there be, though? Steve had never liked science. 

“There’s more to me then what’s in the textbooks,” he said with a smile, before adding, “Although science was never really my thing, to be honest. My, uh.” He cleared his throat. “My best friend growing up had loved this stuff, though. Maybe some of it’s rubbed off on me.”

It’s the first time he’d ever talked about  _ himself.  _ It was a disorienting experience. 

“Right,” Bruce said. “James Buchanan Barnes, right?”

Bucky swallowed around the impressive lump in his throat. “Called him Bucky.” 

Bruce gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He died in the war, right?”

Bucky nodded, not trusting himself to speak. 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said again. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

To Bucky’s utmost dismay, he felt his eyes start to prickle with tears, felt his throat close up. The problem with joining the team was that he became close with them, became friends. And it was much harder to lie to your friends. 

Bucky had made a lot of mistakes in his life. Trying to beat up Kevin Olsen, sleeping with Andrea Peluso, sleeping with  _ Andrew  _ Peluso, falling in love with his best friend and screwing half of Brooklyn instead of admitting it. But the worst mistake that Bucky had ever made was joining the Avengers. 

It had been easy, before. Well, easy probably wasn’t the best word for it, but it was manageable. It had been easier in the war, when he had been with his team, when the only thing he had to do differently was wear Steve’s stupid outfit, which looked ridiculous on him. It had been easy to be Steve then. Just a constant mantra of  _ what would Steve do?  _ And the answer was usually the opposite of what Bucky wanted to do. He had wanted to hide like a coward -- Steve had joined the army. Or tried, at least. He had wanted to hide in the shadows and shoot people from afar -- Steve had taken a shield and fought hand to hand. Bucky had wanted to crawl home after Azzano -- Steve had played the role of dancing monkey and performed his way to the top, just for the chance to fight against bullies. Bucky ran away, and Steve ran towards, so for those two weeks after he’d lost his heart he had mostly stayed himself, just dressed like an idiot and doing the opposite of what his instincts said to do. 

But now? There was no space for Bucky in the Avengers. He couldn’t be Steve in public and Bucky in private, because there was no private anymore. There was no longer Steve Rogers and Captain America; they had morphed into one, and Bucky had to play the part always. He could barely be Steve, even -- all anybody wanted was Captain America, and they wanted him all the time. 

It was hard to remember who you were when you spent your time pretending to be someone else. He couldn’t live his day as Steve and then go to bed as Bucky. They were beginning to merge in his head, and it felt like he was making one of them up. The problem was he couldn’t remember which one. Who was real and who wasn’t? Which came first, Captain America or the one who stole his name?

He missed Steve with a ferocity that didn’t exactly surprise him, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Almost every night he dreamed of that train, of that fall, of Steve reaching out, of the blue of his eyes. Sometimes they were accusatory, angry that Bucky couldn’t save him. Sometimes they were Bucky’s eyes staring back at him, as if he had actually been the one to fall off the train like history said. In the disorienting moments right after waking up, sometimes he couldn’t remember what was the truth and what was the story. 

Bruce looked slightly panicked. Bucky couldn’t blame him. He would have felt the same if Bruce had started tearing up, too. 

“Sorry,” he said to Bruce, attempting a smile. 

“Don’t apologize,” Bruce said. Bucky appreciated the sentiment, especially coming from someone who looked so profoundly uncomfortable. “I can’t imagine what it’s like. You have every reason to be upset.”

For one moment, Bucky considered telling him. The truth sat heavy on his chest, and he imagined the relief he would feel. He could tell Bruce the whole thing -- could tell him about Steve, the real Steve, all the amazing things nobody knew. Could tell him about the plan Peggy had come up with, who Bucky really was. Hell, Bucky could even probably tell him the secret he hadn’t even admitted to himself. It would help so much, telling just one person. 

Except it wouldn’t just be one person, would it? Bucky knew how these things spread. He would put all his trauma on Bruce, a man who, frankly, had enough to deal with. It would sit heavy on Bruce’s soul just as it sat heavy on Bucky’s, and who could blame Bruce if he told someone else?  _ Just one person  _ was never just one person. 

Besides, the building had ears. JARVIS would hear, and even though Bucky was reasonably sure that AI would keep it a secret if he asked, the truth would still be in a system out there. 

No. It was too risky. 

“You know,” Bruce said, probably sensing a subject change was necessary. “I didn’t try to recreate the serum because I wanted to -- be great, or something. I wasn’t trying to make myself a superhero. There was… well, he’s actually the secretary of state, now. He wanted the serum recreated. I was the best man for the job.”

Bucky couldn’t help but wonder why Bruce had told him. Could he sense the resentment that boiled under Bucky’s skin at each mention of the serum? At the thing that had taken every bright thing about Steve and amplified it until it sputtered out, the thing that had completely ruined Bucky’s life?

He wanted to tell Bruce that it wasn’t his fault, what happened. He was beginning to think that it wasn’t the serum that was the problem, but the men they were using it on. That you needed a man like Steve to get it to work, and despite his numerous good qualities, Bruce wasn’t Steve Rogers. 

That was the problem. No one was Steve Rogers. So they put the serum in people like Bucky, not realizing that it wasn’t the serum who made you a superhero. You had to already be a superhero for it to work. 

But he knew that wouldn’t help Bruce, the knowledge that he was probably doomed from the start. 

Instead what he said was, “You made yourself a superhero anyway,” because that was the truth, too. 

* * *

A year passed. So did another. More and more he moved into the public eye, and more and more he was required to be Captain America, until there was no space for Bucky Barnes anymore. He never ended up moving out of Stark Tower, so even his home life became a performance. 

He got a Twitter, started doing PSAs where he introduced himself as Captain America. Told the kids to stay in school, talked about detention, talked about fucking  _ puberty.  _ It was a sham, all of it. It got to the point where he debated going to a coffee shop, sunglasses on and hat pulled low, just to hear the barista yell out  _ Bucky.  _ He hadn’t quite sunk to that level of pathetic yet, though. 

When it was announced that SHIELD was going to relocate back to Washington, he went to see Fury. 

New York had been his home once, yes, but not this version of it. Or maybe it was just this version of  _ him _ . New York had been home when he was young, when he had nothing but Steve and his sisters, and that had been all he’d needed, then. And Bucky didn’t want to be That Guy, who said that home was where the heart was and all that bullshit people said to sell greeting cards, but he couldn’t deny that New York didn’t feel the same, now. And it wasn’t just the tall buildings, or all the flashy lights. It was something else, something deep inside him, the ugly thing that had been growing inside of him since his country put a gun in his hands. 

So he went to see Fury. 

“Requesting transfer, sir.”

Fury looked up from his desk. “Want to expand on that, Rogers?”

Fresh starts didn’t always work out the way you wanted them to, but he was hoping maybe Washington would provide something that New York hadn’t. 

“I know SHIELD is going back to its original headquarters in Washington. I’m requesting a transfer.”

Fury studied him, his eye narrowed. “In order to authorize this transfer, Cap, you’ll have to be involved in a lot more missions. We can give you your very own STRIKE team, but no more lazing around, or giving speeches about what happens when your balls drop.”

Bucky glared. “I wouldn’t call what I was doing  _ lazing around,  _ sir, and may I remind you that it was SHIELD who requested the PSAs as a way to improve public image of the Avengers.”

Fury waved his hand around. Bucky resisted the urge to take out the other eye. 

“The point is you’ll be sent out on missions for SHIELD. These missions might not align with your personal beliefs. Are you prepared for that?”

“Yes.”

Fury laughed. “You’re a shit liar, Rogers. Or maybe I just know better than to expect you to ever do something you don’t want to.” He shook his head. “You will be a welcome addition to the team. Relocation approved.”

Here was the thing -- Steve Rogers was a bad liar. Steve Rogers never did anything he didn’t want to. Steve Rogers would have fought against any mission that didn’t align with his morality. Bucky, however, wasn’t like that. Bucky was a great liar (“I’ve decided to join up,” he’d told Steve, draft paper firmly hidden in a loose floorboard under his bed), and Bucky had lost all sense of morality when he realized he’d shoot any man, German or otherwise, who posed any threat to Steve. Steve’s moral compass meant Bucky was the one who had to do the dirty work, a job he took to well. 

But it didn’t matter that Bucky Barnes was a good liar, because Bucky Barnes didn’t exist anymore. 

He nodded. 

“Thank you, sir.”


	3. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consistent chapter lengths? i don't know her

Bucky was pretty sure this guy was going to kill him. Honestly, though, he was just having a little fun. He had so little of it lately. 

He ended up lapping the guy about three times before Bucky found him collapsed against a tree. 

“Should I call an ambulance?”

The man laughed. “More like a new set of lungs. Dude, you just ran like thirteen miles in thirty minutes.”

“I’m losing my touch.”

“Oh really? You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take another lap.” He waited a beat, and then said, “Did you just take it? I assume you just took it.”

Bucky laughed, then noticed the embroidery on the man’s shirt. “What unit are you with?” He asked, unable to stop himself. 

“58. Pararescue. But now I’m working down at the VA. Sam Wilson.”

Bucky stuck out his hand and hauled Sam up. “Steve Rogers,” he said. It no longer felt strange to introduce himself like that. 

“Yeah, I kind of worked that out. Must have freaked you out, huh? Coming home after the whole defrosting thing.”

Bucky paused. With one exception, no one had ever really asked him how he had adjusted after being brought back, and the one guy who had didn’t really count, because he had said, “Wasn’t it cool waking up and finding out you can look at naked women online whenever you want?”

He attempted a smile. “It takes some getting used to.” He turned to leave, but Sam cut him off. 

“It’s your bed, right? It’s too soft. When I was over there I’d sleep on the ground and use rocks for pillows, like a caveman. Now I’m home, lying in my bed, and it’s like --”

“Like you’re gonna sink through to the floor,” Bucky finished. Sam nodded. “But you know, for me -- it’s the permanence of everything? People all stay still now. When I was fighting, we were all over, went wherever we were needed. And it’s so hard to stay in one spot, now. Every time I think about settling down, I think, what if I’m needed somewhere else? Might be why I moved,” he said, only realizing it as he said it. “Trying to regain some normalcy.” He turned back to Sam. “How long?”

“Two tours. You must miss the good old days, huh?”

People always said that to him. He wasn’t sure why. “Nah,” he said. “It’s pretty good, nowadays. Food’s way better, we used to boil everything. Got rid of polio and shit, which is good. Internet is very helpful. Been using that a lot. There’s a lot to catch up on.”

“Marvin Gaye, 1972, ‘Trouble Man’ soundtrack. Everything you’ve missed, jammed into one album.”

Bucky nodded. “I’ll remember that,” he said. 

His phone made a noise.  _ Mission alert. Extraction imminent. Meet at the curb :) _

“Well,” he said. “That’s my cue. Thanks for that thing you called running.”

Sam laughed. “I see how it it is. Hey man, anytime you want to stop by the VA, make me look awesome in front of the girl at the front desk, just let me know.”

Bucky smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It was at that point that Natasha showed up. “Hey fellas. Either of you know the way to the Smithsonian? I’m here to pick up a fossil.”

He rolled his eyes at Sam. “She thinks she’s funny.”

Sam smiled at Natasha in the car. “How you doing?”

“Hey,” Natasha said with a smile, as Bucky climbed in the car. 

“Keep your eyes on the road,” he said. Natasha gave him a winning smile and drove off.

* * *

When he walked into Fury’s office, the man was sitting at his desk, doing whatever it was Fury did with his time. He looked up when Bucky closed the door. 

“By all means, come in.”

Bucky chose to ignore this sarcasm. He took a seat across from Fury. “Would it have killed you to tell me?”

“You didn’t need to know.”

“Bullshit I didn’t need to know,” he bit out, before remembering where he was and  _ who  _ he was, and who he  _ wasn’t.  _ Fury looked interested for the first time. “Those people could have died.”

“That’s why I sent you,” Fury said. “The greatest soldier in America.”

“Soldiers trust each other,” Bucky said, remembering his team, the way they’d had each other’s backs, their secrets. That was what a  _ team  _ was. 

“It’s a good thing I’m not running an army then, isn’t it.” Fury sat back. “I didn’t want you doing anything you weren’t comfortable with. Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? Because the man Fury was looking at was Steve Rogers, the paragon of virtue, of doing the right thing, of going onto a ship and saving the hostages and not giving a shit about data or about compromising a mission. So it didn’t matter that Bucky had shot people in the back, that he had had blood and brains splattered on his face, that he would have killed any number of men if it meant Steve was safe. Fury didn’t know that the man he was looking at had a lifetime of blood on his hands, and it didn’t matter how many planes he downed. Bucky wouldn’t have stopped Natasha. 

“Nobody spills the secrets because nobody knows them all.”

“What about you?”

Fury looked at him, eye narrowed. Then he stood up. 

“Come with me.”

Fury brought him down to a level Bucky didn’t have clearance for. The room was huge, larger than Bucky had thought possible, and in it were three huge Helicarriers. Bucky stared at them with an open mouth. 

“This is Project Insight,” Fury said, and Bucky heard pride in his voice. "Long range precision guns that can eliminate a thousand hostiles a second. These can read a terrorist’s DNA before he ever steps outside. We’re going to neutralize a lot of threats before they can happen.”

Bucky waited for shoe to drop, for him to laugh, say  _ just joking.  _ There was no way Fury had looked at these and decided that this was the way. 

“Are we punishing people before they even commit the crime, now?”

“We can’t afford to wait for the crime. We need to be ahead of the curve.”

“Well sure, I wouldn’t commit any crimes if I had a gun held to my head, either.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t look good on you, Captain.”

“And this --” Bucky gestured around them -- “does not look good on you.”

“SHIELD takes the world as it is, not how we want it to be. It’s time you got with the program.”

Bucky put on his best Captain America face. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

* * *

Whatever his intentions might have been, moving to Washington hadn’t really helped whatever he was feeling. He still felt tired and lonely and restless, except now it was almost worse. He hadn’t known the New York he’d gone back to, but at least he’d recognized the bare bones of it. Washington was completely new. And now he couldn’t get those Helicarriers out of his head. Storming out of SHIELD, Bucky looked at the unfamiliar buildings around him and made a stupid decision.

He went to the museum. 

Standing there, he wasn’t sure what he had been expecting. He hated the museum, the biggest reminder that Steve had been twisted and turned into something he wasn’t, conflated so that Steve Rogers  _ was  _ Captain America. No one cared about Steve, all they cared about was Captain America. Bucky couldn’t stand the way they had erased all of the wonderful, beautiful things that Steve had done, what he had  _ been.  _

It was also the biggest reminder that Bucky Barnes didn’t exist anymore. 

There was one small display with the name  _ James Buchanan Barnes  _ written on it, along with his date of birth and a brief blurb about how he was Captain America’s best friend. How he was the only Howling Commando who had given his life. But there was no picture of him. This was all that was left of him. 

He hated the exhibit. Hated the idea of being on display. But it was enlightening in one major way: it showed that Peggy had done the job the only way she knew how -- completely and thoroughly. 

There were no photos of him. Of the real him, of James Barnes. And most of the photos or video of Steve was either him in full uniform or him pre-serum, when the differences were easy to explain away. It was easy to see why: anybody who compared a picture of Captain America of today and Captain America of yesterday could have easily seen that they were different people. So Peggy had ensured that there were very few pictures of Captain America of yesterday. Peggy must have destroyed them to protect both Bucky and Steve, in case they ever found Bucky’s body. In case they ever found  _ Steve’s  _ body. God, what a woman. 

It was after that that he decided to go and see her. 

It wasn’t like he’d actively avoided Peggy, although admittedly it was easy to avoid a woman who was in the hospital. She had been moved to D.C. by her children who thought that being back there, where she had worked, where she had built an  _ empire,  _ would help her Alzheimer’s. Fury had told him when the move happened, but he hadn’t been able to work up the courage to see her. 

It was silly, really. She would know that he was back, it had been all over the news. But his life, his survival, felt like a failure, or some kind of betrayal to the woman who had worked so hard to change history. But standing in the Smithsonian, looking at the fruits of her labour, at what she had done just on the off chance that Bucky would be found --

There was only one person in the whole world who knew who he really was. He didn’t want to hide from her anymore. 

* * *

The nurse gave him a disapproving look when he arrived. “It’s about time,” she said. “She’s been waiting for you for quite a while.”

“Darlene!” Another nurse admonished. Darlene waved her hand impatiently. 

“What? You think I’m afraid of guilt-tripping Captain America?”

“I’m sorry to have kept her waiting,” he said truthfully. Darlene gave him a look that said she wasn’t quite sure she believed him. He couldn’t think of a better nurse for Peggy. 

“Look who decided to show up,” was how Darlene introduced him. He couldn’t help but smile. 

Peggy was -- well, old was the only way to describe it, even though he felt foolish thinking it. Looking at her was painful, in a way he hadn’t expected. Not just the relief of seeing a familiar face after so long, of someone who knew him for him. It was the missed opportunity that hung between them both, the future they had both wanted, hovering, mockingly, just out of reach. 

Peggy looked right, like how she was supposed to, the grey of her hair and the chasm of wrinkles on her skin. He could see, painfully clear, the future the way it was supposed to be: Steve beside her, holding her hand, wedding rings glinting in the light of the sun. There had been talk of what the serum would mean for the aging process, but in Bucky’s imagination Steve was old and grey like he should have been. They would have been happy, with a couple of children who called him Uncle Bucky. He would pull coins out from behind their ears and love Steve from afar, the way it was always supposed to be. 

He could have hated Peggy Carter for the way she charmed Steve so easily, for how he lit up around her. But all he had ever wanted was for someone to see Steve the way he had, and Peggy was good, saw him as Steve and not as Captain America. Bucky loved her for that. Loved her for the way she saw Steve and no one else. 

“I was beginning to think you were mad at me,” she said lightly. “Could we have some privacy please, Darlene?”

Darlene gave him a look that said she wasn’t afraid of him before leaving them alone. As soon as she left, the smile dropped off of Peggy’s face. “Oh, James.”

He sat down on the chair beside her bed. “Not exactly what we had in mind, huh?”

She reached out a gnarled hand and took one of his. “I am sorry. I wouldn’t have done what I did if I knew you would come back. I wouldn’t have made you a footnote in history.”

He tried to smile, tried to give her even the smallest bit of comfort. “I’m glad you did what I asked. He deserves the recognition more.”

Peggy shook her head. “James,” she said. “When are you going to understand that you are as much a hero as he was?”

He was shaking his head before she had even finished. “I’ve been a coward from the beginning.”

She scoffed. “You put a plane in the ocean, darling. You died to save us all.”

“As Steve,” he said, unsure how to put this into words. “Because it’s what he would have done. But I’m not Steve, Peg, not even close. Bucky Barnes wouldn’t have gotten on that plane.”

Peggy rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t be so absurd. Bucky Barnes did get on that plane, you twit. No matter why you did it, you still did it.”

“Did you just call me a twit?”

“You don’t have to pretend to be Steve to be heroic. You always have been.”

He appreciated the sentiment, but he needed to make her understand. “Peggy,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Do you know what made Steve a hero? He did things because he believed in them. Because they were the right things to do. But the only reason I ever did anything was for him. What is heroic about that?”

Peggy was looking at him like she was seeing him for the first time. “Oh,” she said softly. “Oh. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

“See what, Peg?”

“You loved him.”

He laughed. It was a strange but genuine reaction to the idea that anyone could know Steve without loving him. 

“I’m sorry,” Peggy said. “For not seeing it earlier.”

“It was a dangerous secret to have,” he said. “I’m glad it was not so easily guessed.”

“God, you must have hated me.”

He squeezed her hand lightly. “I loved you, Peggy,” he said softly. “For seeing what no one else but me could.”

She smiled at him tearfully, gripping his hand. They sat there for a bit until he felt the grip loosen. 

“James?” She said, voice panicked. “James, you’re back.” She was crying harder now. The nurses had warned him this might happen. She was looking at him like she’d seen a ghost. He supposed she had, in a way. “What happened?”

He tried to look as reassuring as possible, as if this had been the plan all along. “You know me,” he said. “Never did do what I was told.”

* * *

It had been Peggy’s idea.

Morita had dragged him back, when Steve fell. Had shook him until he looked away from the open sky. 

“Sarge,” Morita said, hands firm on Bucky’s shoulders, both for comfort and to ensure he didn’t jump after Steve. Morita’s eyes were wet, too. “Sarge, c’mon, get away from there.”

Bucky did not remember much about what happened next. He did not sleep, because every time he closed his eyes he saw Steve. Morita stayed by his side, and Bucky loved him for it. He didn’t even notice the absence until later, when he finally looked up and spoke. 

“Zola,” he said, voice almost a growl. “Where the fuck is he?”

Bucky would take him apart with his bare fucking hands, both for what he did to him and for Steve, lying broken at the bottom of a ravine. He didn’t care that Phillips wanted him alive. He was going to kill him. He was going to make it hurt. 

“Dum Dum, Monty and Jones took him,” Morita said carefully. “They went on ahead.”

If they hadn’t been in the middle of a goddamn war, Bucky would have thought he’d been joking. “Who the hell authorized that?”

“Cap did,” Morita told him, almost apologetically. 

Bucky looked at him like he’d grown two heads. “Why the hell would he have done that?”

“He didn’t want you near Zola, Sarge. Originally we were going to take him ahead of you and Cap, but Dernier and I decided we should have more than one man with you.”

Bucky wanted to be angry with them, but objectively he knew it had been the right move. He’d shut down after Steve. He shouldn’t have, but he did, and that had meant one less man was there to transport Zola. They couldn’t afford to break down like that here. It was fucking war. 

Who he should have been mad at was Steve, but he couldn’t be mad at Steve, both because all he could feel was guilt and pain when he thought of him, and also because Steve had been right. He had tried to hide it, hide whatever had been growing inside of him ever since they strapped him to that table. Or maybe it had been there already. But Steve had clearly seen. Steve had always seen right through him.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’ve really dropped the ball on you guys.”

Dernier clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s destroy these fucking HYDRA scum,” he said. “ _ Pour le Capitaine.” _

When they got back to base, Peggy was waiting for them. Bucky was ashamed to realize he hadn’t even thought about Peggy, so wrapped up in his own grief that he’d forgotten about his team and about Steve’s girl. He’d been so used to being the only one who loved Steve; he’d been selfish in his misery. 

But that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Bucky was a selfish person. Always had been. 

“We need to talk,” she said, indicating all of them. She led them through camp and into a tent, where the rest of the team was waiting. “Please sit.”

He did. The rest of the guys looked fairly wrecked, like they hadn’t slept in days, like they’d been pulling at their hair. A somber mood, a heavy grief fell over them, and for a couple moments they sat in silence before Bucky spoke. 

“I want to see Zola.”

The men started up a stream of protests, but it was Peggy’s clear voice that cut through the din. 

“No.”

“The fucking little shit is the reason Steve is gone.” He didn’t say dead. He couldn’t say dead. 

“I know, Sergeant,” Peggy said, her voice thick. “And he is too valuable for you to rip apart.”

“I’ll leave him alive,” he said darkly. 

“Zola is in custody and is being interrogated by Phillips,” she said. “He is no longer any of your concern. You have done what was needed.”

He slammed his hand down on the table, feeling guilty when most of his team jumped. 

“That HYDRA piece of trash is responsible for the death of Captain fucking America,” he said, not bothering to watch his language in front of Peggy, not even caring that he equated Steve with Captain America. He had to make them see. 

“I am very, very aware,” Peggy said icily. “But no one here is seeing Zola. Steve kept you behind for a  _ reason. _ He sent your team ahead rather than have you face him. There has got to be a damn good reason for that.”

Bucky bristled. He  _ was  _ angry at Steve, in a detached sort of way, for bringing everyone’s attention to that. How were people supposed to respect him, how was he supposed to lead, if they knew he couldn’t even face Arnim Zola?

He was angrier that they were right. That every time he thought of Zola, he thought of pain, remembered his face as it hovered above Bucky, remembered him poking and prodding and injecting, asking him questions.  _ What about this, how does it feel? What is your pain level at, Sergeant Barnes? Can you feel it when I do this?  _ He felt like a stranger in his own body, unsure of what was flowing through his veins and what it was doing to him. 

There were some noticeable differences, although he’d done his best to keep them hidden. He was bigger and stronger, and he explained it as just a side effect of the army but he knew it was something deeper than that. It wasn’t just added muscle -- Bucky had always been lean, even after all his work on the docks. It was unnatural, the way he’d bulked up. 

But the thing that scared him the most was his healing. It was faster than it should have been. Minor scrapes disappeared almost immediately, and anything more severe was gone within a couple of hours, days if it was really bad. And it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it showed they had changed him, and Bucky was terrified of what else might be lurking inside of him.    
  
So yeah, Steve had been right. Bucky shouldn’t face Zola. But Bucky had been doing his goddamn best to pretend that he was fine, and he was upset that Steve knew him so well, to be able to see through him so easily. But he couldn’t be upset at Steve, because Steve was dead, and it wasn’t fair to hold grudges against the dead. 

“You don’t get to talk to me like that,” he said. The rest of his team shifted uncomfortably, but Peggy never once looked away. 

“Sarge --” Dum Dum said, but Peggy raised her hand and cut him off. 

“You are not the only one who lost him, Sergeant Barnes,” she said calmly. “We all share your grief.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look to see it was, but he sagged into it and nodded.

After a moment Peggy cleared her throat. “I wonder if I could have a moment alone with Sergeant Barnes.”

He was happy to see that his men all looked at him first. Not really asking for permission -- just asking if he was okay. 

He nodded, and one by one his team left. And to his complete horror, as soon as Morita had closed the door behind him, Bucky broke. There were no tears; for some reason they wouldn’t come. Just horrible dry heaves that wracked his body. His shoulders shook violently and he doubled over to hide his face, arms wrapped around his middle as he curled up. 

Peggy didn’t move or say anything, something he was immensely appreciative of. This was embarrassing enough, dangerous enough already, to be mourning like a wife with a telegram in her hands. Had Peggy offered some kind of comfort, he didn’t know if he would have been able to look her in the eyes again. 

The loss of Steve was a physical pain in his chest, like somebody had reached inside of him and torn out a kidney or the appendix. Something he could live without, sure, but it  _ hurt,  _ and he would never be truly whole again. 

People were wrong, when they said it felt like death, when they said it felt like you couldn’t breathe anymore, like your breath had been stolen. He was alive; his heart was beating and pumping blood and he was breathing easily, inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. He was alive. He was breathing. He was still here. Despite the loss his body hadn’t, for one second, forgotten how to continue. 

The problem, Bucky thought, as he clutched at himself, as he tried to hold himself together, was that you couldn’t remember what the fuck the point of a beating heart was, what the hell the point of breathing was. What was the point of a beating heart without Steve there for it to beat for?

Peggy let him disintegrate in front of her until he was done, until the shaking stopped and he picked himself up off the floor, as the reality of a world without Steve settled down on his shoulders. It was only until his breathing had evened out to normal that she spoke. 

“Sergeant Barnes.” She was quiet, almost apologetic. Bucky took a breath, tried to reorient himself in a world where his heart beat for nothing. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. Peggy put her hand up immediately to stop him, shaking her head. He noticed that her eyes were wet, but he pretended not to notice. He figured she would prefer it that way. 

“I know this is a hard time,” she said. “But I need to discuss something difficult.”

Difficult? Bucky might have laughed, if he could remember. Nothing could be difficult, anymore. Nothing could be more difficult than watching Steve fall. 

As she began to talk, he realized he was wrong. 

* * *

His neighbour was on her way to do her laundry when he got home. She was pretty and nice and seventy odd years ago she was the exact type of girl he would have put the moves on, the exact kind of girl he would have dated as a distraction to the way he felt about Steve. But even if he had felt comfortable dating as “Steve” -- which he didn’t -- he had the freedom to admit she wasn’t who he wanted. 

There were a few things that had really shocked him about this century. Phones in your pocket that could think faster than any human, huge coloured televisions screens in everyone’s home. But the thing that had shocked him the most was when he had seen two men holding hands on the street. To have that freedom… Bucky couldn’t even imagine. He was shocked. He was awed. He was happy. 

He was  _ jealous. _

But despite the times, despite how things could change, Bucky didn’t have the luxury to explore what it meant or how he felt. He was Steve, now, and always would be. He couldn’t be who he wanted to be. 

And he was okay with that. If it was for Steve, he could do anything. 

“By the way,” Kate said as he excused himself from the excruciating small talk. “I think you might have left your radio on.”

Bucky thanked her and waited until she was gone. 

He had certainly not left the radio on. 

He didn’t go in through the door. He went around, sneaking in through his own window, staying low and close to the corners. He wasn’t sure who it would be, that they would announce their presence like this. 

He wasn’t sure if he was more relieved or annoyed to find out that it was Fury. He was  _ definitely  _ annoyed when Fury held out his phone with the huge text reading  _ ears everywhere.  _ Sure, it’s not like he hadn’t suspected. He had trust issues like that. But he was still annoyed. 

Oh, and then Fury showed him another text that said  _ SHIELD compromised,  _ which was great. His annoyance only escalated when the fucking wall exploded, and it  _ really  _ skyrocketed when Kate, his lovely neighbour, the  _ nurse,  _ walked into his apartment with a goddamn gun and spouting her fucking SHIELD credentials. Plus, he had just painted this apartment, trying to make it seem more like home. He had spent an obnoxious amount of time in Home Depot trying to colour match. And now some asshole had blown out his fucking wall and shot his boss. 

Yeah. Bucky was really, really annoyed. So he left Kate -- Agent 13 -- with Fury, pocketed the USB Fury had slipped him, and ran after the shooter. He grabbed the shield and then, for convenience’s sake, jumped through a window. 

The shooter was fast. Remarkably fast, possibly even faster than Bucky, which shouldn’t be possible. Bucky pushed himself even more, bouncing off a few walls, before heading to the roof to try and cut him off. Except by the time he got there, the shooter was already on the other side. 

Bucky hurled the shield. The man on the roof caught it easily, as if it were nothing. A metal arm glinted in the streetlight. Most people who were caught on the other end of the shield were bowled over by it, but the shooter didn’t even budge. Bucky didn’t know who the hell this guy was, but for the first time, he felt a sliver of fear. He saw the man’s eyes drop to the shield he had caught so easily; he expected the shooter to hurl it back at him, but instead, to Bucky’s immense surprise, he dropped it. 

By the time Bucky got to the fallen shield, the shooter was out of sight. 

* * *

Fury was dead. Bucky saw them pull the sheet over his face, heard them announce time of death, and he knew he was in shit. SHIELD was compromised. He had a USB key filled with God knows what. The only person who knew what the hell was going on was dead. He had no allies. 

“Cap? They want you back at HQ.”

Bucky really didn’t want to go back to SHIELD. He didn’t know who he could trust; Fury’s last words to him had been not to trust anyone. Could he trust Fury, even? Who was to say that Fury had been telling the truth?

Although it wouldn’t have made sense, to have Fury killed if he hadn’t known something. And then there was the man on the roof, with the metal arm. Something was definitely up, and apparently it was Bucky’s job to figure it out. 

When he had agreed to take up the shield, he certainly hadn’t been planning on  _ this.  _

And then? Well, then shit hit the fan. Alexander Pierce subtly threatened him, and then the STRIKE team less than subtly threatened him. They got a few good punches in and Rumlow shoved some electrical rod into his stomach, which hurt like a bitch, and then he jumped out the window, which wasn’t nearly as cool as he had thought it would be.

He bought some new clothes, an ill fitting outfit and a pair of “skate shoes” that were, without a doubt, the stupidest things he had ever seen. He pulled a baseball cap low over his eyes and went back to the hospital to get the USB stick he had hidden in the vending machine. 

It wasn’t there, but Natasha was. Bucky looked around and then grabbed her by the arm, shoving her into an empty room. 

“Where is it?”

“Safe,” she said, infuriatingly. Bucky shook her. 

“I mean it, Romanoff. Where is it?”

“Where did you get it?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Fury gave it to you. Why?”

“I don’t know.” Bucky hated to admit it. He liked Natasha, but he didn’t trust her, and Fury had told him not to trust anyone. “What was on it?”

“I don’t know.” At his incredulous look, she said, “I don’t. Just because I act like I know everything doesn’t mean I do. But I know who killed Fury.”

And that’s when Natasha told him about the Winter Soldier. A ghost story, a dangerous assassin with a body count of over two dozen who had shot a man straight through Natasha. She said going after him was a dead end, and then she smirked and brought him to the mall, where she plugged in the USB and brought them to Camp Lehigh. 

When they got to the Camp, Bucky stopped and looked around. Steve had told him all about Camp Lehigh, about the flag pole and how his stupid, self-sacrificing ass had jumped on a dummy grenade. Bucky himself had been trained in Wisconsin; he tried to look around as if he had been here before, as if he was reliving memories, and not seeing the place for the first time. 

“You know it?”

“This is where Captain America was created,” Bucky said, which was not technically a lie. 

“Well, it’s a dead end,” Natasha said. “No heat signatures, no waves… what are you looking at?”

Bucky walked over to a bunker that shouldn’t have been there. He didn’t know what the layout of the camp should have been, but --

“Army regulation,” he said, walking over to the bunker. “It forbids storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks. That building isn’t right.”

They broke into the bunker and found the beginnings of SHIELD. Pictures of Howard Stark and Phillips hung on the wall, along with a portrait of Peggy. And behind a bookshelf, they found an elevator. 

“Why do you need a secret elevator if you already have a secret office?”

They found a room filled with computers that, according to Natasha, were ‘ancient,’ although they were definitely younger than Bucky. She plugged the USB into a port, and the computers came to life around them. 

A voice spoke. A voice that sent a horrible, cold feeling sliding down Bucky’s spine, that made his head spin, that made the  _ room  _ spin. There was no way. He was dead. He had to be dead. 

_ Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038.  _

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Born 1917. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born 1984.”

Natasha’s eyebrows furrowed. “Some kind of recording. But who is…”

“I am not a recording, Fraulein. I would ask your friend. He knows me well.”

“Do you know him?” Natasha turned to look at him and then grabbed his arm. “Woah, Steve. Are you okay?”

“Yes,  _ Captain,  _ are you okay?” Zola’s voice was thick with mockery, and Bucky was transported back, and he was lying on a table in Azzano and Zola was looming over him, poking and prodding him and sticking him with needles, and his body was on fire, and all he could remember was his name and his rank. 

“Steve --”

“Arnim Zola,” Bucky spat out. “He was a scientist who worked for Red Skull. He’s dead.”

“Wrong!” Zola said, his smug face staring out from the screen. “Wrong! I have never been more alive,  _ Captain. _ ”

“Why does he keep doing that?” Natasha asked. Bucky was dimly aware that he was shaking.

_ Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038.  _

“Science saved my mind when it couldn’t save my body, into two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain, Sergeant.”

“Sergeant?” Natasha asked, but Bucky couldn’t concentrate on her. Zola’s voice was like knives under his skin. When Bucky didn’t answer, she turned back to Zola. “How did you get here?”

“I was invited. After the war SHIELD recruited German scientists. They thought I could help them.”

“HYDRA died,” Bucky said, his voice hoarse.

“And so did James Buchanan Barnes. Off a train, I believe. Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”

“No!” Bucky’s voice was loud and higher than usual. “No. Prove it.”

“With pleasure,” came Zola’s slimy voice, as over the screens he played images of Red Skull and SHIELD as he told them that HYDRA had reformed within SHIELD, used it as a cover and as a way to coerce humanity into willingly surrendering its freedom, changing history when it wasn’t going the way HYDRA wanted. 

“SHIELD would have stopped you,” Natasha said, ever eager to defend them. 

“Accidents happen,” Zola said, as pictures of Howard and Maria Stark flickered across the screen. “We created such chaos that humanity chose to sacrifice freedom to ensure safety. We won, Sergeant. You died for nothing.  _ He  _ died for nothing.Your sacrifice was useless.”

“Who is he talking about?” Natasha asked, but Bucky didn’t hear her over the anger pulsing under his skin, as the horrible image of Steve falling beyond his reach played in front of his eyes. He grabbed the shield and slammed it into the screen, giving Steve one more chance to fight back. 

Zola’s face appeared on every screen in the room. 

“As I was saying…” 

Bucky stood there with his fists clenched. 

“What’s on the drive?” Natasha asked, once she realized that Bucky seemed incapable of speech. 

“An algorithm for Project Insight.”

“What kind? What does it do?”

“I would love to answer, but I’m afraid that you will be far too dead to appreciate it.”

Natasha checked her screen and then swore. “Short range ballistic. Thirty seconds tops. Fired from SHIELD.”

“I’m afraid I have been stalling,” Zola said, voice gleeful. “We are both out of time. A shame that you will die while nobody knows who you are, isn’t it Sergeant?”

Natasha and him took cover in a grate, her body tucked under his and the shield over their heads, as the place blew up around them. 

* * *

There was only one place he knew where to go, and Sam was nice enough to let them in. He and Natasha got cleaned up, and she found him after, towel drying her hair. 

“So,” she said. He didn’t look at her. 

“So what?”

“I was going to give you the chance to gracefully approach it at your own speed but I guess not. What the hell was Zola talking about back there?”

Bucky shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said, voice hoarse. He had stood in the shower for longer than usual, staring at the wall until his hands stopped shaking, until he was able to close his eyes without seeing Zola, without feeling the cold of the table beneath him. 

“He called you  _ Sergeant.  _ Said you would die with no one knowing who you were. What did he mean? Who are you?”

“I’m someone you can trust. Can that be enough for now?”

He expected her to say no, that Natasha, who had just found out that she hadn’t gone as straight as she had wanted to when she joined SHIELD, would demand the truth from him. No more lies, no more hiding behind names. But after a moment she nodded and sat back. 

“For now,” she said, and Bucky visibly relaxed. He smiled at her; her acceptance felt like more than just that. It felt like the start of something, like a real partnership. 

Like a  _ friend.  _

* * *

The morning was busy. Sam made them breakfast and then showed them what he had really been up to in the war. They kidnapped Jasper Sitwell and threw him off a roof, and then Bucky learned the horrifying truth about what HYDRA was using the Insight Helicarriers for. Something dark and heavy was alive in Bucky’s chest as Sitwell talked, as he learned how the bastards he had died to stop had taken over anyway, had developed such a stranglehold on the country. On the world.

Not for the first time since he’d woken up in this new century, he wondered what Steve would have done if it had been him instead. If he survived the train and been the one to crash the plane, been the one to wake up in a familiar city in a strange world. Would he have felt so disheartened? So  _ betrayed?  _ Would he have felt the urge to turn and run, the urge to say,  _ I gave everything already, this is no longer my fight? _ Would he have felt like he given up his life for no reason, that he would be better off dead and ignorant of what became of his sacrifice? But it wasn’t his sacrifice, was it. It was Steve’s sacrifice. So what would Steve do?

He knew exactly what Steve would do. Steve would keep fighting. Until the day he physically couldn’t, and maybe even then, Steve would keep fighting. Every cause Steve had ever fought for, he was willing to die for. It wouldn’t even have been an option for Steve to stay out of it. 

Which meant it wasn’t an option for Bucky, either. 

“HYDRA doesn’t like leaks,” Sitwell said as Sam drove them down the highway. 

“Why don’t you shut up, then?” Sam said from the front. Sitwell opened his mouth to say something again when someone landed on the top of their car and pulled Sitwell out, throwing him to the traffic. Bullets started to fire down at them until Bucky reached out and grabbed the emergency brake, throwing the man off the car. He tried to get a good look at the man who had attacked, but all he could see was the glint of metal in the sun before a car smashed into them from behind. They skid out of the car on one of its doors, and as Bucky and Natasha stood there, the Winter Soldier fired a grenade at them. Bucky pushed Natasha out of the way and crouched behind his shield. 

It hurt like a  _ bitch.  _ The vibranium absorbed most of the hit but he still went flying, off the bridge and into a bus. He lost consciousness for a few moments, and when he came to he was barely able to escape a storm of bullets. By the time he got out of the bus he saw the Winter Soldier following after Natasha. 

She had been shot by the time he reached her. He saw the Soldier point his gun as Natasha clutched her bleeding shoulder. Bucky didn’t really think, didn’t try to formulate any kind of plan. All he knew was that Natasha was badly hurt, and he needed to get the Winter Soldier away from her. He had caught Steve’s shield before, on the roof. So this time Bucky just launched  _ himself  _ at the Soldier. 

It was like colliding with a wall. The Soldier was taller than him, with a mask covering the bottom part of his face and blond hair that was dirty and too long, reaching to his ears. He seemed to be composed of nothing but solid muscle, and although Bucky had surprised him enough to knock him off his feet, it felt like he had just tried to body check a mountain. 

The Winter Soldier recovered quickly. Bucky could only assume that Natasha had gotten herself to safety. He couldn’t risk looking back, because the Soldier was  _ fast.  _ Bucky had already had an inkling of that, based on how quickly the man had run that night with Fury, but he hadn’t realized just  _ how  _ fast. The bastardized version of the serum that ran through his veins meant that Bucky was always the fastest, always the strongest (among mortals; Thor was a different story). He was noticeably different. 

The Soldier was better. 

Who the hell  _ was  _ this guy?

For each punch Bucky threw, the Soldier blocked him easily. He seemed to have a never ending supply of knives. He was more than keeping up.

He was winning. 

Bucky jumped back and crouched behind the shield, praying for some time to breathe. Amazingly, the Winter Soldier hesitated, eyes narrowed on the shield, and Bucky remembered the way he had dropped it on the roof, letting it fall to the ground as if it had burned him, as if he physically couldn’t hold it. 

For whatever reason, the Winter Soldier reacted badly to Steve’s shield. Bucky watched as the Soldier shook his head as if trying to clear it. He didn’t understand, but he certainly wasn’t about to look a gift-assassin in the mouth. 

He went on the defensive, striking out with the shield instead of his fists. It was the first time during a fight that the shield really felt like an extension of himself. For once he didn’t feel like an imposter. It was perfectly balanced in his hand, like some final gift from Steve; the shield was protecting him, giving him a much needed advantage. He pushed the Winter Soldier back, his shield nothing but a blur of colour. The Soldier fought to escape, twisting to try to get away from Bucky, who grabbed him by the mask and flipped him. 

The mask clattered to the ground. Bucky waited, eager to see who the man behind the mask was. 

The Winter Soldier stood up, and Bucky dropped the shield. 

The hair was longer and dirtier, and he seemed somehow bigger. But the worst thing of all were the eyes. Icy blue and cold and empty of any recognition. 

The world stopped. The ground fell out from beneath his feet and he was falling, falling, falling. It was a lie. A trick. Bucky had seen him die. 

And yet. And yet Bucky knew that face better than his own. He dreamed of it. That face was his biggest regret. And it would make sense, the way he flinched away from the shield… 

He felt like he was going to be sick. 

“Steve?” He said, and it was wrong, it was so wrong to call this creature Steve, this stony eyed man who shot at Bucky and his friends and looked at him without knowing. And there was another layer to that strangeness, too, because  _ he  _ was Steve. For so long he had been Steve Rogers that to see the real one in front of him caused his head to spin. He didn’t know how to be Bucky Barnes anymore. He only knew how to be Steve. 

“Steve,” he said, trying to stay calm as his entire world flipped upside down. “Steve, it’s me. It’s Bucky.”

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Steve said, and it felt like dying. He raised the gun but Bucky didn’t move, couldn’t move. He didn’t understand. He had  _ seen  _ Steve die. 

Except he hadn’t, had he? He had seen Steve fall, but they hadn’t found his body. And it wouldn’t be surprising that Steve could survive such a fall. He must have lived through it. He must have been found. 

Just as Steve pulled the trigger, Sam swooped in and kicked him, sending him flying. Bucky could do nothing but watch as they fought, until suddenly there was an explosion; he turned to see Natasha, pale and barely standing, a grenade launcher in her hands, and by the time he turned back -- slowly, like he was moving through water -- Steve was gone, and the STRIKE team was there with a gun to his head.

* * *

Later, he wouldn’t be able to remember how they got to the bunker where Fury was. He knew that Natasha was in bad shape, that Hill was there somehow, but he was unable to trace the steps. All he could think about was Steve, and what they must have done to him, of how everyone -- Bucky and Peggy and the team,  _ everyone  _ had given up on him. They should have known the serum would have allowed him to survive. They should have looked for him. They should have sent Zola ahead and scoured the mountain for him. Instead Bucky had become nearly catatonic in his grief, and HYDRA had gotten to Steve first. 

“Steve,” Hill said, and it took him a moment to realize she was talking to him. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Bucky looked around at the people with him. Natasha, who was starting to regain some colour in her face. Sam, who had opened his door to a man he barely knew when everyone else had been after Bucky’s head. Fury, who was a liar, and a manipulator, but who, when it came down to it, did the right thing when it mattered. Even Hill, who Bucky didn’t know all that well, had risked her life to save them, to get them out. 

This was his team. These were his friends. If he couldn’t trust them… 

He did trust them. And he owed them the truth. 

“I know who he is,” he said quietly. “The Winter Soldier. I know who he is.”

“Who is he?”

He looked at them, each one in turn. 

“Steve Rogers.”


	4. Part Three

“All due respect, Agent Carter,” he said, in a tone of voice that had no respect at all. “And excuse my language, but you’ve lost your fucking mind.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, infuriatingly calm. “But I truly believe this is the only way.”

“By disrespecting his memory?”

Peggy actually  _ snorted.  _ “You don’t believe that, and nor do I. You aren’t here for Captain America, Sergeant Barnes, you’re here because Steve Rogers asked you to be. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I would go so far as to say that you rather hate Captain America.”

Bucky chose not to answer that. He didn’t like how easily Peggy could read him. 

“It will never work.”

“To be blunt, Sergeant Barnes, I think I am capable of pulling it off.”

“Captain America is the most famous man in the world. And I look nothing like him.” He was pacing now, fighting the urge to pull out his hair. He didn’t want to be doing this right now. He wanted to wake up from this horrible nightmare. He wanted to be dead on a table in Azzano. He wanted to be crumpled and broken at the bottom of a ravine. He wanted anything but this. 

“You don’t have to,” Peggy said calmly, as if they were discussing something normal. “You won’t be selling war bonds, Sergeant. The only ones who will know will be us and your team.”

Bucky slumped back into the chair. “Why?” He asked, voice hoarse and strained. Peggy’s face softened, and he hated her for it a little bit. 

“Do you want the sentimental answer or the strategic one?”

“I want the real one.”

“They’re both real. But if HYDRA finds out that Steve is dead, there will be nothing in their way. If the Allied forces find out that Steve is dead, it will be a massive blow to morale while giving HYDRA a second wind. It will have devastating effects.”

“Is that the sentimental or the strategic one?” Bucky asked, just to be an ass. Peggy was a big enough person not to rise to the bait. 

“Do you really want Steve’s legacy to be this? He deserves more than an accidental death. For all that he was willing to sacrifice --”

“He was a hero,” Bucky said quietly. “He shouldn’t have died for me. I never should have let him do it.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Peggy said, sounding genuinely angry. “Did you respect him? Did you trust him?” Bucky looked at her sharply, as if daring her to imply that he didn’t. “Then allow him the dignity of his choice. He damn well must have thought you were worth it.”

_ He was wrong,  _ he thought. 

“You don’t, though,” he said, wanting a fight, wanting something to stop the itching under his skin. “You must think his death was wasted. Used up on me, don’t you Agent Carter?”

Peggy stared him down. “Do not presume to know what I think, Sergeant Barnes,” she said coolly. “I am not in the business of valuing one life over the other.”

Bucky snorted. “This is war, Agent. That’s exactly the business you’re in.”

“Steve Rogers died to save you,” she said evenly. “Is this how you would think to repay him?”

He shut his mouth, embarrassed. If Steve were here he’d sock Bucky in the jaw for taking to anyone like this, let alone Peggy. But Steve  _ wasn’t  _ here. That was the problem. 

“It should have been me,” he said, anger ebbing away, opening up space for the vast chasm of guilt he felt, far more than he ever could have thought could fit in a person. 

“But it wasn’t,” Peggy said simply. “And so dwelling on what you wish had happened will not help anyone.”

“And yet you’re trying to change what happened. You’re trying to give him a better death. How is that honouring the dignity of his choice?” He asked, throwing her words back at her. 

“It has nothing to do with Steve, Sergeant Barnes. I am not doing this for him. I am doing this to protect you.”

That stopped him in his tracks. “What?”

“Steve died for what -- and who -- he believed in. But you and I both know that Steve is… was, a better man than most. I want you to live through this war, as did Steve. I do not want you to come out on the other side known as the man behind Captain America’s death.”

Bucky was stunned into silence.

He didn’t know Peggy well, although Steve had certainly talked about her enough. He liked Peggy; she was strong and smart and beautiful and she loved Steve. Bucky could never begrudge anybody who loved Steve. He had never had any delusions that Steve could love him back, and even if Steve had, Bucky never would have let him ruin himself like that. Steve was good. Steve was going to do great things. Bucky wasn’t worth throwing away his future for. He had been sure that Steve was going to live a good life, with a woman who loved him. 

There weren’t many people deserving of Steve’s love. Bucky certainly wasn’t. But Peggy Carter was. And he had been nothing but horrible to her. 

“How would it work,” he said hoarsely. Peggy smiled, recognizing it for the apology it was. 

“It would only be until we find Red Skull. Once he is taken down we will release a statement that Steve Rogers was killed during the fight.”

“A more fitting end,” he said. “A proper death.”

“I disagree,” Peggy said, shaking her head. “I think giving his life for someone he loved was the exact way Steve would want to go.”

Bucky didn’t answer that, because what he wanted to say was it didn’t matter what Steve thought, because Steve was an idiot with no self-preservation skills whatsoever. 

Clearly. 

“Who would know?”

“Only me and your team. I haven’t told Phillips. Steve had extra suits, and we have his shield. You’re smaller than he was --” And wasn’t that just goddamn hilarious -- “but HYDRA will see a man in Captain America’s suit with Captain America’s shield and not think twice. Now, you’ll have to be more careful than Steve was. You don’t have the serum to keep you safe.”

His fists clenched. “Agent Carter,” he said, making eye contact. “There’s something I think you should probably know about Azzano.”

* * *

“You all know the story,” he said tiredly. “Steve Rogers was a scrawny little asshole with shit lungs who never knew how to back down from a fight. He was chosen for Project Rebirth, where he was pumped full of super soldier serum. They made him a dancing monkey for a bit, before he went on a one man suicide mission behind enemy lines, rescuing a group of Allied soldiers. Then he and a group of men that were later given the name Howling Commandos rampaged across Europe for a couple years, destroying HYDRA bases. In 1945 Steve’s best friend James Barnes fell from a train in the Alps, and a couple weeks later, Steve put the Valkyrie in the North Atlantic, saving the goddamn world.”

“We know all this,” Fury said, annoyed. 

“Yeah, except you don’t. Because what really happened is that Steve Rogers fell from that train, not Barnes.”

Fury made an unconvinced sound. “Who the hell are you supposed to be then?”

“James Barnes,” Natasha said quietly. 

“Bucky, actually,” he said. “Never much liked James.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam said. 

“Steve saved my life that day,” he said, fighting off the image that had been burned into his eyelids, of Steve reaching out as he fell. “He stopped me from falling but he couldn’t stop himself. Agent Carter didn’t want the story to end there, not when we were so close to Schmidt. Would’ve demoralized our side and given HYDRA a second wind.”

“So you became Steve,” Sam said. 

“It was only supposed to be temporary. No one except Peggy and my team knew. When we took down Schmidt, we’d tell everyone else that Steve died during that fight. A hero’s death, like he deserved. Except --”

“Except then Steve Rogers crashed the Valkyrie in the ocean,” Hill finished for him. 

“I told Peggy to make it so I was the one who fell from that train. Let Steve be remembered the way he should have been. Clearly she succeeded. And it would have been fine, except you assholes decided to defrost me.”

“How did you survive it?” Hill asked. “Crashing the Valkyrie should have killed you. And we’ve all seen you in action. You do things that only someone super could do.”

He smiled, cold and bitter. “You ever wonder why Steve Rogers would risk so much to storm Azzano by himself? They captured me, experimented on me, gave me their own bastardized version of Erskine’s formula. Whatever they put in me was enough to help me survive.”  _ Even though all I wanted was to die. _

Everyone was quiet. He supposed it was a lot to take in. 

“So let me get this straight,” Fury said. “America’s most advanced super soldier has been turned into the world’s deadliest assassin, and has been working against us for seventy years.”

Bucky’s fist clenched. “You never wondered why I didn’t look much like the pictures?”

“Figured it was some sort of discrepancy with the footage. Or some version of 1940s photoshop. Sure, it caused us a bit of concern, but you find a guy in Captain America’s suit, with Captain America’s shield, in the plane that Captain America crashed - well. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck.”

“And there are no photos of you,” Natasha said. “Of James Barnes. Agent Carter must have gotten rid of most of them, in case your body was ever found.”

“She did. Made it so that if anyone ever found our bodies, there wouldn’t be enough evidence to catch us in the lie. Was easy, back then, could never pull that off now.”

“Did no one look for Steve Rogers after he fell?” Hill asked.

“Of course they did. You think they wouldn’t look for Captain goddamn America, even if they wanted to keep it hush? Those bastards just got to him first.”

Silence settled among them again, uncomfortable and tense, until Sam finally broke it.

“So we’re facing a highly trained killer, the deadliest assassin in history, who has a special serum running through his veins that basically makes him an invincible superhero, and he’s also one of the most famous American icons.”

“Yes.”

Sam summed it up pretty perfectly: “Well, fuck.”

“Basically, yeah.”

“All right,” Sam said. “So what’s the plan? I assume you people have a plan.”

“We have to stop the launch,” Nat said. 

“Unfortunately,” Fury said, opening a briefcase containing three chips. “The council is no longer taking my calls.”

“What are those?”

“Once the Helicarriers reach three thousand feet, they'll triangulate with Insight satellites becoming fully weaponized. We need to breach those carriers and replace their targeting blades with our own. One or two won't cut it. We need to link all three carriers for this to work, because if even one of those ships remains operational a whole lot of people are going to die,” Hill explained. 

“We have to assume everyone aboard those carriers is HYDRA. We need to get past them, insert the server blades, and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage what's left.”

Bucky looked up. “We’re not salvaging anything. We’re taking down the Helicarriers and we’re taking down SHIELD with them. It’s not worth saving, Nick.”

“SHIELD had nothing to do with it,” Fury protested. 

“SHIELD had  _ everything  _ to do with it! From the very goddamn beginning HYDRA has been running the show. Saving even the smallest bit of SHIELD means saving part of HYDRA. This entire time it’s been compromised and nobody noticed.”

“Why do you think we’re meeting in a cave?” Fury said peevishly. “I noticed.”

“Too late,” he said quietly. “You noticed too late.”

“You’ve been lying too, in case you’ve forgotten. How are we supposed to trust you?”

“Nick,” Hill said, but Bucky cut her off.

“Seventy years ago I watched my best friend die in order to save me, and I put on his uniform and took his shield to try and finish what he started. I died so he could be remembered, not so he could be dragged out of the ocean decades later for the sake of your agendas. You don’t point a gun at someone and then ask why they lied to you.”

“Who’s pointing a gun?”

Bucky slammed his hands down on the table in front of Fury. “You dragged me out of the ocean and into a new millennium. You gave me almost no time to adjust before you put me in an absolutely horribly designed uniform with no protection to suit your fucking nostalgia and sent me off to fight aliens. You keep me under constant surveillance so I’m always available to fight your wars, and you’ll look like the good guys because you have Captain America on your side. You thawed me out and you told me this was how the world works and this is what you’re going to do and who you’re going to work for and it’s such an honour to meet you, Cap, and you think I’m going to tell you that I’m not him? That the brave hero you’ve all spent your lives idolizing fell from a train protecting his idiot best friend? That your history is a lie? What would you have done if I had told you? If you can tell me that, you’ll know why I lied.” He stood up straight. “It all goes. SHIELD, HYDRA. We burn it to the ground.”

“He’s right, Nick,” Hill said. She turned to Natasha, and then to Sam, who shook his head. 

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I just do what he does, only slower. And with less yelling.”

Bucky bit back a smile. Fury looked him over. “Guess you’re giving the orders, then.” He paused. “Captain.”

* * *

Sam found him on the bridge. Bucky had all but fled when they were finished talking, not in the mood to answer anymore questions, to deal with the way his friends looked at him as if they didn’t know him. And they didn’t, really; they knew him as Steve Rogers, or at least as Bucky’s version of Steve. Who was to say they would want anything to do with him after this? After years of lying?

“Hey man,” Sam said, coming up to stand beside him. Sam was the one he had lied to for the shortest amount of time, but that didn’t make it any better. He still had every right to tell Bucky to fuck off, to tell him that he was out, that he wasn’t risking his life for a man who had been lying from the minute they met. 

“Hey,” Bucky said, waiting for the blowup. 

Instead Sam just said, “He’s going to be there, you know.”

“I know,” Bucky said, because it was all he was able to think about, about Steve and the way he used to be, about his long fingers around his pencils, how he’d limp home after fights with his head held high, how Bucky would sleep beside him on really bad winter nights to try and stave off the cold. The way he had appeared above Bucky when he was on that table in Azzano, like a goddamn angel. The way he used to smile at Peggy, they way he looked when he was angry, the way he looked when he was sad, the way he looked when he was happy, the way he looked when he was falling off a train. And the way he looked now, dirty hair that fell into his eyes, metal arm, blue eyes that had been drained of all the love that made Steve who he was. 

“Whoever he was, he’s not that guy anymore. And I think that now… I don’t think he’s the kind of guy you save. I think he’s the guy you stop.”

Bucky shook his head. “If you knew Steve you wouldn’t be saying that.”

“Maybe I don’t know Steve, but I think I’m starting to get to know you.”

Bucky shot him a look. “You still think so, after what I told you?”

Sam shrugged. “Look, who hasn’t impersonated a national icon occasionally?” He bumped their shoulders together as Bucky huffed a laugh. “I get why you did it. And I… I guess a man who loves his friend so much that he would do all this just to make sure he died a hero seems pretty good in my books.”

“If you think that, then you’ll understand that I can’t just let him go.”

“He might not give you a choice. He doesn’t know you.”

“Yet,” Bucky said. “But he knows the shield. There’s still a bit of Steve in there. I’ve died for him once, I can do it again. Come on, gear up. We’ve gotta get going.”

“Hey Bucky,” Sam said, and it made him stop in his tracks. It was the first time someone had called him by his name in years. Even Peggy called him James. It felt good. It felt right. 

It felt like a beginning.

He turned around. “Yeah?”

“You wearing that?”

Bucky looked down at his dirty clothes and grinned. “Nah. Got a better idea.”

* * *

“Could you do me a favour?” He asked Natasha as she suited up. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Like with Sam, he half expected her to tell him that she didn’t owe him anything after what he’d done, but instead she just nodded. “What is it?”

“I need you to break me into the Smithsonian.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow, but that was the only response she had. 

“I have a question,” she said later, in the car on the way to the museum. 

“I might not answer it.”

“Why did you do it? Why did you agree to be him? Why did you agree to  _ die  _ as him?”

Bucky hesitated. On the one hand, he was hesitant to give a voice to the things he had held inside himself for so long. On the other hand, he felt that if anyone was going to understand, it was Natasha. 

“You had to have known Steve,” he said slowly. “The reason Erskine chose him wasn’t because he was a good soldier. He was a good man. To his core, he was good.”

“You loved him,” Natasha said in dawning realization. Bucky couldn’t help but laugh at this understatement of the century. “Were you lovers?”

The freedom of this century, he thought, to ask that question without a second thought. 

“No,” he said. 

Natasha said, “But you wanted to be.”

“When he fell,” Bucky said, voice tight. “When he fell, it took all my strength not to jump right after him.”

“Instead you became him.”

“It’s like this, okay. The serum takes everything and amplifies it. With Steve, it took a good man and made him better. But I have never been like Steve.” His hands clenched on the steering wheel. “Steve had been Captain America since the minute he was fucking born. I think I was a killer the minute I was born. The army put a gun in my hands, told me where to shoot and I did. And you know, part of me liked it. Liked that I was good at it, liked that I could hit a mark from so far away. And if I thought of them as marks, it was fine. It was when I thought of them as people --” That wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. Words just kept spilling out of him. “Look, there was always something in me. Some ugly thing. And whatever it was they put in me, it amplified just like Steve’s had.  But there wasn’t enough good in me to amplify.” 

Natasha was quiet. Maybe she could sense there was more inside him, fighting to get out. 

“Point is, should have been me who fell from that train. I wasn’t worth saving. The problem is, Steve always thought everyone was worth saving. I didn’t want to take up the shield, but Peggy convinced me. I figured, a bit of pretend for Steve was the least I could do.”

“So then why die as him?”

This was an easy answer. “Because James Barnes was a coward. I always have been. Steve tried so many times to join the army but they had to come after me, had to drag me away from him. You think I would have boarded the plane as myself? That I would’ve put her in the water? Not as Bucky Barnes. But as Steve? Steve would’ve done anything for his country, and I would have done anything for Steve. So I did what he would have done, and I gave him a death worth dying for. And then 70 years later they pulled me from the wreckage when all I had wanted was to die. And they called me Captain Rogers and thanked me for what I had done. I wasn’t going to take that away from him. They wanted Steve Rogers. No one would’ve wanted Bucky Barnes. Sam was wrong, when he said Steve wasn’t the kind you save. Steve’s the only part of me worth saving.”

Natasha was quiet. She was quiet for a long time, up until they were inside the Smithsonian, until they were standing in front of the exhibit and he realized there was a choice in front of him. 

“For what it’s worth,” she said, looking at the suits in front of them, understanding his dilemma. “No matter what you said to yourself to convince yourself to down that plane, it was still James Barnes who did it.”

He grabbed the suit and left. 

* * *

The plan was this: Natasha would impersonate Councilwoman Hawley to get into Pierce’s office, where she would use him and Fury to disable the security and release all SHIELD files to the internet. Him and Sam would replace the chips on the Helicarriers, and then, once they had targeted each other, Hill would fire. SHIELD and HYDRA would be out in the open for everyone to see, and Project Insight would be destroyed. 

Assuming everything went well. 

But first, Bucky had to get SHIELD on his side. 

“Attention SHIELD agents. My name is Bucky Barnes, but a lot of you know me as Steve Rogers. That’s kind of a long story, but right now, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you know the truth, finally. The truth is, SHIELD isn’t what you think it is. It’s been taken over by HYDRA, with Alexander Pierce at its helm. The STRIKE and Insight team are HYDRA too. They want complete control, and they’re willing to kill anyone to get it. They shot Nick Fury, and if Insight launches, they will be able to kill anyone who gets in their way, unless we stop them. You don’t have to trust me -- I’ve been lying to you, as well. But you do have to trust yourselves. You have to ask yourselves what you’ll pay for freedom.”

He took a step back from the mic only to find Sam grinning at him. “You rehearse that in the mirror before we left?”

“Oh, shut up and let’s go.”

They got Alpha and Bravo locked relatively easily, other than the bullets and the HYDRA agents trying to kill them and the heat-seeking missiles. But they got two chips in position with almost ten minutes left and no sign of Steve. Bucky would worry about what that meant after Insight had been destroyed. 

“Hey Sam, I need a lift,” he said into his comm. 

“Let me know when you’re ready!”

Bucky jumped off the Helicarrier. “I’m ready!”

Sam grabbed him, yelling in pain as they both dropped before he was able to regain altitude. As they landed on the final Helicarrier, he said, “You’re a lot heavier than you look.”

“My ma always said breakfast was the most important meal of the day.”

It was like he came out of nowhere. One minute he wasn’t there, and the next he was, right in front of them, and before either of them could react or even register what had happened Bucky had a boot in his chest and was sliding down the side of the Helicarrier. Sam yelled out his name and dove to try and grab him, but the last thing Bucky saw before he slipped too far down was Steve grab one of Sam’s wings and throw him. 

He clung to the side of the Helicarrier, fighting to drag himself back up, looking for some kind of handhold and foothold in the smooth surface. By the time he heard Sam’s voice through the radio, he had managed to pull himself back up to the surface. 

“I’m okay. Still on the Helicarrier. Where are you?”

“Grounded,” Sam said, and Bucky swore. 

“All right. I got it.”

Him and Steve, alone. The way it always had been. He could do this. 

Steve was waiting for him at the center of the Helicarrier. For a moment they just stared at each other. Steve wasn’t wearing a mask this time. Bucky assumed that was intentional on HYDRA’s part. Make him look the man he loved in the face while Steve tried to kill him. 

But Bucky wasn’t wearing his mask, either. No more Captain America suits, no more stars on his chest that he didn’t deserve. He had grabbed his old uniform from the Smithsonian, the one he had worn when he was allowed to be himself, the blue that signified himself as Captain America’s right hand man. He felt good, in it. He felt right. Like he had been wearing the wrong sized clothing for his entire life and had only just found something that fit. 

“People are going to die, Steve, and if you were in your right mind, you’d rather die than let that happen.” Steve continued to stare at him coldly, without a hint of recognition. Bucky gripped the shield tight. It was his best weapon. Steve would beat him if they went hand to hand; his serum was stronger than whatever bastardized prototype Zola had injected into Bucky, and Steve had moves that he had never had before, which meant HYDRA had been training him. But he knew the shield, and it unnerved him. Bucky had to use that to his advantage. “You know me, Steve. Please remember.”

Steve pulled his gun; Bucky threw his shield. Steve jumped out of the way to avoid it, bullets going wide, before coming at Bucky, who realized belatedly that he had played his only card too early. Steve grabbed a knife from some hidden pocket on himself -- he seemed to favour them to guns, and the thought gave Bucky hope, that even now Steve was somewhere in there, unwilling to shoot unless necessary. That hope only lasted until Steve shoved the knife into Bucky’s shoulder, and then he was primarily concerned with the pain and the fact that he dropped the chip. 

Steve grabbed it. Bucky yanked the knife out of his shoulder, swallowing a scream, and then managed to grab Steve, wrapping an arm around his throat and pinning him to the ground. “Let go, Steve,” he gritted out, using his name as much as possible. Steve wouldn’t drop the chip, so Bucky applied more pressure, cutting off the air until Steve went limp, chip falling out of his hand. 

Bucky grabbed it and scrambled back up to the control center, Hill talking in his ear. “One minute, Cap,” she said, and they were really going to have to talk about that when they got out of this. Bucky was about to snark back at her when pain bloomed up his side and he looked down to see Steve, one arm hanging limp at his side, gun pointed at Bucky. 

He fired another shot into Bucky’s shoulder. “Thirty seconds!” Hill said, and Bucky grit his teeth and got up again. 

Another shot. Bucky fell, hand going to his stomach and coming back covered in blood. With the last bit of energy that he had, he reached out a shaking hand and locked the chip in. 

“Charlie locked,” he said, dropping back down and putting a hand to the gunshot wound in his stomach. 

“All right, get out of there,” Hill said. 

“No. Fire now.”

“Bucky --”

“Now. Fire now.”

She did. Gunfire rocked the Helicarrier and Bucky closed his eyes. He had done what he needed to do; he had taken down Insight. His secret was out now. He had tried to protect Steve and he had failed, he had more than failed. Steve had been hurt more than Bucky could even imagine. 

There was no way he could get off this Helicarrier with how injured he was, but even if he could… he should have died all those years ago and he hadn’t, and it had caused this. He had put a plane in the Arctic to save the world and to save his best friend, and he hadn’t saved either. Maybe this would put things right. 

As the Helicarrier was torn to pieces around him, he heard a scream. He looked down to see Steve pinned to the floor by a piece of metal. Bucky grit his teeth against the pain that had spread to his entire body and dropped down to the floor beside him. 

Steve looked scared; it wasn’t a look Bucky had seen very often, but his eyes were wide as he struggled against the unmoving rubble, the arm Bucky had dislocated useless, the metal one trapped. Bucky didn’t even think, just grabbed the piece that was pinning Steve and lifted with the energy he had left. He was able to get a space big enough that Steve could slide out.

“Steve,” he said. “Steve, you know me. You’re my best friend.”

“You are Steve Rogers,” Steve said. 

“No,” Bucky said. “My name is Bucky Barnes.  _ You  _ are Steve.” Steve was shaking his head. “Steven Grant Rogers, born July 4, 1918.” Except he would know all that, wouldn’t he, if HYDRA had been telling him that Bucky was Captain America. “You used to think that the Fourth of July fireworks were for your birthday. I had to drag you out of every alley in Brooklyn because you tried to fight some asshole twice your size. You liked to sit at the kitchen table with your sketchpad because it had the best lighting --”

Steve lashed out at him with his metal arm. “Shut up!”

“You were Captain America! This was  _ your  _ shield, you recognize it, I know you do!” He thrust the shield out and Steve stepped away from it, eyeing it warily. “It’s yours,” Bucky said. “You know it, and you know me.”

“No I don’t!” Steve punched him again. Bucky took the shield and dropped it at Steve’s feet. 

“I’m not going to fight you,” he said, exhausted to his very bones, tired of pretending. “You’re my best friend.”

Steve let out a scream and collided into Bucky, pushing him down at the edge of the Helicarrier. “ _ No,”  _ he shouted, eyes blown wide as he loomed over Bucky, metal fist slamming into Bucky’s face. “You’re my mission,” he said. Bucky felt his nose break, felt his lip split open as Steve continued to punch him. “ _ You are my mission!” _

“Then finish it,” Bucky said. Black was edging into his vision. “Finish it, Stevie. Cause I’m with you until the end of the line.”

Steve had been pulling back for another punch, but his fist froze in mid air, and he looked down at Bucky with wide, scared eyes.

And then the ground fell out from underneath them. By the time he hit the water, Bucky had lost consciousness. 


	5. Part Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHOOPS i got sick lmao here is the end!! once again a big thank you to everyone who helped me on this, but not to my husband, who kept asking "don't you have a fic to write?" every time i tried to do something else

“Sergeant --”

“Listen Agent Carter. I gotta put her down.”

“Sergeant --” 

“Do you have a better idea? I’m open to suggestions.”

The other end was silent, because there were no other ideas.

“Peggy,” he said, figuring she would forgive him the lack of formality. “Can you do me a favour?”

“What?” Her voice was thick. A small, selfish part of him was glad someone was mourning him. His men would, too. That was comforting. 

“Change history for me, will ya? Make me a footnote. James Barnes fell off that train, all right? Give Steve the hero’s death he deserves.”

“James --”

“Listen to me,” he said, and if his voice was a little high, a little panicked, well. That was understandable. “There ain’t no honour in fallin’ off a train. But this is a proper sacrifice. People’ll rally around this. Let him be Captain America one last time. Forget about me.” He never needed to be a hero. Wasn’t, anyway. He was a goddamn coward. But he had never needed recognition. Not from anyone but Steve. “Promise me, Peggy.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I promise, James.”

Relief and resignation washed over him. “Thank you,” he said, aware that the words were not enough, but they were all he had. “And call me Bucky.”

The line went dead. He never got to hear her response.

The water sped up at him. He closed his eyes. He thought of Steve. 

* * *

He became aware of music playing. The dream was still fresh in his mind; he could see the water coming at him as clearly as if he had crashed the plane yesterday. He tried to shake it out of his head and ended up groaning as pain crashed through him. 

He opened his eyes. Sam was there beside him, nodding off. 

Bucky closed his eyes again. 

* * *

The next time he woke up it was night and he was alone. He tried to move again and almost blacked out from the pain, so he shut his eyes again and let sleep take him. 

* * *

He woke up periodically. Most of the time Sam was there; at one point he managed to croak out Sam’s name before passing out again. He wasn’t sure how long he had slept for until he woke up without feeling like he had been run over by multiple trucks, which meant his advanced healing had kicked in, which meant he must have been asleep for a couple of days. 

There was someone in his room. Bucky sat up just as a familiar voice said, “Three gunshot wounds. Massive blood loss. Fractured ribs. Broken nose. Shattered cheekbone. Fingers broken in multiple places. Heavy bruising.”

“Steve?” He squinted in the darkness and saw a figure standing by the window. 

“Advanced healing is one of the defining characteristics of Steven Rogers, Captain America.”

“You’re right,” Bucky said, fumbling around on the table for a light, unwilling to take his eyes off of Steve in case he disappeared. “You’re looking pretty good. Injuries must have healed fast, huh?”

He finally found the light. Steve  _ did  _ look good. He was completely healed, like Bucky had guessed, but he had also found a change of clothes, a pair of jeans and a shirt with a jacket on top, a baseball hat shoved on his head. He had a glove on his left hand, hiding the metal of his arm. 

“Intel says that you are Steve Rogers. You are Captain America.”

“But you know that’s wrong, don’t you? Or you wouldn’t be here.”

Steve continued to stare at him. 

“You remember, don’t you? That’s why you came.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Then why did you come?” When Steve didn’t answer, Bucky asked again. “Steve. Why did you come?”

“I wanted to see,” Steve said tensely. He wasn’t looking at Bucky. 

“See what?”

“If you were dead.”

Bucky chose to take that to mean  _ I wanted to make sure you were alive.  _

“Steve --” But he was disappearing back through the window before Bucky could figure out what he had been planning to say. 

* * *

He was released from the hospital. They ‘buried’ Nick Fury, who went to Europe to continue to look for HYDRA bases. Hill went to work for Stark, and Natasha went to work out some more covers after all of hers had been blown. Or at least that’s what she told them. 

It was tense between him and Fury, and him and Hill, and the media had been calling for a statement from him for days. People were livid that the man they thought was Captain America had been a liar, that he had wreaked havoc over DC. Natasha had gone to Capital Hill and told them that it didn’t matter who Bucky was, really, all that mattered was he had stopped a Nazi organization from killing 20 million people. And somewhere in all those files Nat had released to the public was the story of the  _ real  _ Captain America and what had happened to him, and the world would read that, too, find out what happened to their hero, find out the lengths Bucky had and would always go to for the real Steve Rogers. 

Natasha had brought him an even bigger file, called in a favour from Kiev, a file thick with secrets too important to be included in the HYDRA database. Bucky took it, and he hid in Sam’s house, and he read the whole goddamn thing. 

When Sam went in to check on him, he found Bucky curled on the bed in the spare room, drenched in sweat and sobbing. 

“What they did,” he said, choking on air. “What they did to him. It should have been me.”

Sam sighed and grabbed the file, pried Bucky’s fingers loose from it. “Man, we really got to deal with that survivor’s guilt of yours.”

“Sam,” he said, broken. “What they did…”

“Hey.” Sam sat down on the bed beside him and looked him in the eye, hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “We’ll find him, all right?”

But what state would he be in when they did?

* * *

This is what the file said:

They found him at the bottom of the ravine. Almost every bone in his body had been broken and he was missing half of his left arm. They knew who he was -- how couldn’t they? Captain America, lying broken on the ground. A gift to the German army. They kept him prisoner until Zola was released --  _ Zola,  _ the lying fucking scum, God, Bucky wished Peggy had let him see that monster, had let him tear Zola to pieces with his bare fucking hands. Instead Bucky had put a plane in the ocean and they had  _ let Zola free,  _ built their fucking government agency around him, and all the while… 

All the while they had Steve strapped to a table. All the while they were crafting him into their perfect fucking weapon as SHIELD grew up around them. 

They amputated the rest of his arm at the shoulder and attached their metal limb, painted a star on it to celebrate their  _ Captain.  _ They injected him with Zola’s experiments and Steve’s body rejected them all. Erskine was a better scientist than Zola. Steve would have been proud of that. 

But instead all they did was double the doses, triple the doses. They would beat him within an inch of his life to see how quickly he healed. They kept him on ice to ensure he didn’t age, to ensure he remained their perfect weapon. And after each mission they wiped his memory, over and over and over and over until he didn’t even know who he was, until they showed him a picture of Bucky and said  _ that’s Captain America, your job is to kill him,  _ and all Steve had said was  _ ready to comply.  _

But their hold on him was strenuous; Erskine’s serum was so powerful and Steve’s body so strong that it rejected everything they gave him. Keeping him under control was a constant battle, and if he remained out of cryostasis for too long their control slipped and he began to remember things. Bucky held onto the tiny bit of hope that gave him, and the way Steve had stood in his hospital room, looking down at the floor,  _ I wanted to see. If you were dead. _

“It’s my fault,” Bucky said, over and over as he clutched at Sam. “It’s my fault.”

Sam just held him, and Bucky broke. This was worse, so much worse than the night Steve had fallen from that train, so much worse than being in Peggy’s office and trying to hold himself together. He had barely been able to go on when Steve had only been dead, but this was so much worse. Steve had been in hell while Bucky slept off seventy years in a crashed plane. 

He thought he had been saving the world. As if any world without Steve was worth saving. 

* * *

It was almost two months before Steve found him again. His hair was still too long and shaggy. He was sitting at Sam’s kitchen table flipping through a magazine. 

“Who are these people,” he asked, monotone. Bucky took a seat across from him and looked at the upside down pictures. He wanted to do -- something. Wanted to yell, or cry, or grab Steve, or something to let out all of the jumbled emotion inside of him. But he stayed still, too afraid that any sudden movements would scare Steve away, like a skittish cat.  

“Um, actors. They star in pictures. I think they’re, uh, getting a divorce.”

Steve continued flipping through the magazine. He was wearing a zip-up hoodie and a faded pair of jeans, a glove still hiding his metal arm. There were a pair of sunglasses on the table beside him. He looked almost normal, until he looked up at Bucky with eyes sunken into his face and skin a pale, sickly colour. 

“Steve,” he said in horror. “What happened to you?”

“Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield. Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country,” Steve said in response. It took Bucky a moment to place the words; they were from the Smithsonian, the small display dedicated to himself. 

“You went to the Smithsonian,” he said. 

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“Tell me who you are.”

“Bucky Barnes.”

Steve slammed the magazine shut. “You’re  _ lying.  _ Barnes fell off a train in 1945.”

“Then why are you here? If you don’t believe me, why did you come find me again?”

Steve didn’t answer. With his gloved hand he started ripping the edges of the magazine. Bucky was really hoping Sam was done with that one. His friend’s weird obsession with tabloid’s wasn’t something he understood, but Sam was a good enough friend that Bucky wasn’t going to give him shit for being so personally invested in Jennifer Aniston’s life. 

“I didn’t fall off a train. The museum… that’s not the whole story. And you know that, because you’re here.” Steve didn’t answer, just continued to rip the edge of the magazine. “What happened to you?” Bucky asked, unable to stop himself any more, staring at the bags under Steve’s eyes and the sharpness of his cheekbones in his thin face. He looked… sick. Depleted. “Are you sick?”

Steve shook his head, wiping his mouth. “I… they gave me drugs. Before.” And of course he wouldn’t have had them in weeks, Bucky thought. Whatever HYDRA had given Steve to keep him compliant had run out, and Steve was suffering withdrawal from the drugs. It was like he had gone back in time but to a different universe, where Steve was big and strong but still sick. How many times had he seen Steve, pale and sunken and weak? But he had been allowed to help Steve, then. He could hold him and take care of him, force feed him and hold a cloth to his forehead, wipe down his sweaty body. He didn’t know how to help this Steve, this ghost come to life, who was right in front of him and yet still so far away. 

But it turned out it was mostly muscle memory. Bucky got up and rummaged about in the fridge, getting together some soup and a roll from the cupboard before putting the kettle on for tea. He was half expecting Steve to flee, but every time he turned around he was still there, sitting at the table, probably reading about Jennifer Aniston and her reaction to the Brangelina marriage. He got together a bowl of soup and placed that on the table in front of Steve; he put a bit of sugar in the tea and then placed that in front of Steve, as well. 

Steve looked up at him. “What is this?”

“Uh. Soup. Sam’s mom makes it. It’s really good. And that’s just… tea. It might help.”

Steve stared at him for another moment more before he turned to the soup in front of him. He picked up the spoon, taking a few tentative sips before abandoning the spoon altogether and sipping straight from the bowl. After a few slurps he looked at Bucky, an almost sheepish expression on his face. 

“I haven’t eaten much.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said, letting himself smile around Steve for the first time. He was  _ here.  _ He was back and in front of him and relatively safe, a little rough around the edges, sure, but  _ alive.  _ Heart beating, blood in his cheeks, soup dripping down his chin, and Bucky had to sit on his hands to stop himself from reaching out and wiping it off. “Have as much as you want.” As Steve ate, Bucky watched him, before finally saying, “Steve --”

“Tell me. What happened. You said the museum was a lie.”

Bucky sighed. “It is. But I… it’s not a very believable story.”

Steve dunked the roll in his soup. “Tell me,” he repeated. 

And so Bucky did. He started from the beginning, from the  _ very  _ beginning, the very first time he had laid eyes on Steven Grant Rogers, nine years old and scrawny, fighting a kid twice his size in a back alley. Bucky had stepped in to help, and they had both gotten their asses kicked. They’d been inseparable after that. He had just told Steve about Peggy when Steve’s eyebrows started to furrow. 

“Peggy…”

“Do you remember Peggy? She was your girl.”

Steve shook his head. “No.”

“It’s okay if you don’t remember,” Bucky said, trying to be soothing. “It’s still early.”

“No,” Steve said, face scrunched in concentration. “No, I mean she -- she wasn’t my girl.”

Now Bucky was the one confused. “What do you mean, Steve? Sure she was. You two were crazy about each other.”

But Steve still didn’t look convinced. “Peggy…I loved Peggy. But I…” He was looking frustrated, so Bucky interrupted. 

“It’s not important, Steve. Do you want me to continue?” He was eager to get the story out, the full story laid bare in front of them, free for Steve to pick through, to fill up the holes in his memories. His best friend was there in front of him and Bucky would do anything to get some version of Steve back, some version of Steve that knew him and loved him and validated what Bucky had done. But even if he didn’t get that, even if the Steve who came back from the dead was a Steve who didn’t know him, or a Steve who knew him but hated him, a Steve who was angry about what Bucky had done… Bucky would take that, would accept it with open hands. Any version of Steve was better than no Steve. Bucky would rather live miserably in a world where Steve Rogers was alive than thrive in a world where he was dead. 

Steve nodded, so Bucky continued. He got to the part about Azzano before Steve interrupted again. 

“They gave you the serum?”

Bucky nodded. Steve stared at him. His eyes were sunken and dim and clouded, suffering from some horrible withdrawal, but beneath the haze he looked almost…  _ hurt. _

“You didn’t tell me,” Steve said, softly, and Bucky realized with a heart stopping revelation that Steve meant  _ before.  _ During the war, after Azzano. Steve was there and he knew him and he remembered, no matter how fractured those memories were. 

“I… I didn’t --” He didn’t get a chance to finish, didn’t get a chance to explain that he  _ couldn’t  _ have told Steve, that he was trying to figure out how to hold himself together, how to live without looking over his shoulder, how to sleep without screaming. He couldn’t have told Steve, filled with brightness, about the ugly thing curled up in Bucky’s chest. But he didn’t get a chance to try to figure out how to put those thoughts into words, because the front door opened. Sam called out, and before Bucky could stop him Steve was out of the seat and across the room, crawling out through the kitchen window.

* * *

There was silence for months, until Bucky and Sam were in Europe, tracking down HYDRA bases and looking for Steve. Bucky told Sam he would go to the ends of the earth to find Steve, but that Sam didn’t have to come; Sam had just asked him when he wanted to leave. 

Steve would have loved Sam, Bucky thought. 

They were freezing their asses off in some rundown hotel near Prague. It seemed, impossibly, colder in the hotel than it was outside. It wasn’t that there was any shortage of money; Tony was sending them an absurd amount and Bucky still had more money than he knew what to do with (turned out, when ‘Captain America’ was found, still alive, that he was entitled to a share of the profit from the use of his image for seventy years. Needless to say, his image had been used a lot). But they didn’t want the attention, and nobody looked twice at you in the those kinds of places. Sam was out getting them dinner, and when Bucky came out of the shower, Steve Rogers was sitting on his bed. 

He looked even more different from last time. He had gotten his hair cut; it looked like the way he had used to wear it. His eyes were brighter and he had colour in his cheeks again. Bucky stood in the doorway to the bathroom, towel clutched around his waist, watching as Steve lounged on his bed. 

“Steve,” he said carefully, walking into the room and rummaging about in his bag for a pair of pants. “You look good.”

A smile played at the edges of Steve’s mouth. Bucky almost dropped at the sight of it. “Do you feel better?” Bucky asked, grabbing a change of clothes. He stood there awkwardly, looking at them. Should he go back into the bathroom to change? He had changed in front of Steve hundreds of times, there was nothing to feel awkward about. But there was so much between them right now. How would Steve react to Bucky just dropping his pants?

This was fucking stupid. They had both been through so much. There was no reason Bucky should be worrying like this. He let the towel drop to the floor and got dressed, and when he turned back to where Steve was sitting, he was surprised to see a faint blush spreading across Steve’s cheeks. 

“Uh, sorry,” Bucky said, wondering how this was a situation he had found himself in, that his best friend and unrequited love of his life was back from the dead and sitting in his shitty hotel room after decades of brainwashing and murder and Bucky was apologizing for being naked. Steve ducked his head.

“Don’t worry,” he said. His eyes were bright when he looked up at Bucky again, like he was finding the humour in this situation, too. They were six months out from the fight on the Helicarrier and he looked almost like himself again, other than the metal arm at his side. There was still something about him, of course, some hidden darkness that Bucky didn’t know how to reach, but he felt positive that Steve was healing. “You were telling me about what happened.” He wasn’t speaking in such disjointed sentences anymore. Bucky threw a shirt on and sat down on Sam’s bed, facing Steve. 

He picked up after Azzano. Thankfully Steve didn’t ask him again why Bucky hadn’t told him, just listened to him, eyes on Bucky’s face. Bucky was able to tell the story in a detached sort of way until he got to when Steve fell. 

He cut off, looking away from Steve. The words were stuck in his throat.  _ And then you fell. And I couldn’t get to you. I lost you, and it was my fault.  _

Steve said, “I remember.”

“What?”

Steve’s voice was quiet. “I remember. I remember when you almost fell. I remember I would have done anything to save you.”

“I wish you hadn’t,” Bucky said, and he was ashamed at the way his voice broke. “I wish you had have let it be me.”

“I don’t,” Steve said, fiercely. “I’d live it a hundred times over if it meant you were safe.”

Bucky shook his head. “That’s not fair. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

Steve cocked his head to the side. He still had something about him, some kind of predator instinct that he didn’t use to have. And then he said, slowly, “You’re mad at me.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I’m not.”

“You are. You’re mad that I put you in this position. And you weren’t allowed to be upset at me when I was dead, but now I’m not.”

“Why would I be angry at you?”

“Because I left,” Steve said easily. “And I took you with me.”

He was right, and Bucky hated that. Because Steve  _ had  _ taken Bucky with him, when he fell off that train. Bucky wasn’t allowed to be himself after that. He had to be Steve. He had to be Captain America. And somewhere in all of that, all of those years, Bucky Barnes had gotten lost. And maybe he was a little upset at Steve for that. For forgetting. For leaving him alone with a legacy he wasn’t big enough to fill. But that wasn’t  _ right.  _ He shouldn’t be mad at Steve. Steve had gone through hell --

The door opened. Sam stood there with a greasy bag of takeout and took in the scene in front of him. “Hello,” he said slowly. Steve stood up, nodded at Sam, and then left. Sam watched him go with a strange expression on his face. “Okay,” he said, walking into the room and passing Bucky the bag. “That was strange.”

“I think I’m mad at him,” Bucky said, holding the bag, looking at the closed door. Sam took a seat on Bucky’s bed across from him, since Bucky was still on his. He nodded. 

“Okay.”

“That’s -- that’s wrong, right? I shouldn’t be mad at him. He’s been tortured. He’s been through hell and I’m complaining because I had to pretend to be him for a couple years.”

Sam shrugged. “I think you’re allowed to feel whatever you feel.”

Bucky collapsed back onto the bed. “That is such a cop-out answer.” 

Sam laughed. “What’s your favourite colour?”

This was not the direction Bucky had been expecting Sam to go. “What?”

“What’s your favourite colour?”

“Yellow,” he said. Sam made a face like he wanted to laugh at him but didn’t want to ruin whatever weird mood this was. 

“Okay. Sure. What’s your favourite prune juice?”

“I -- what?”

“I don’t know. It was the first old thing I could think of.”

Bucky flipped him off lazily. “Why are you asking me this shit?”

“Look, man,” Sam said. “You’re allowed to be upset that you completely lost your identity and had to live as someone else. Just because we make the best of our situation doesn’t mean you can’t be upset about it.”

Bucky threw his arm over his face. “You’re very wise,” he said sardonically. Sam laughed.

“Eat your greasy fucking burger, Captain America.”

* * *

They tracked him through Europe, not necessarily to find him -- clearly Steve would find them when he wanted to -- but to clean up the messes he left. Steve was finding HYDRA bases and wrecking them, leaving them smoking, smoldering ruins. But after months on the run, they started to get homesick. Bucky wasn’t sure if he would call it homesick, actually; it was more that he was wistful for an opportunity to create a home, now that he could be himself, whoever that was. And maybe that was part of it, too -- he wanted the ability to figure out who Bucky Barnes was in this new century. Maybe he could put some roots down, finally. 

So they went home. He was certain that Steve would find him if he wanted to, but there was also a part of him that was a little apprehensive to see Steve again. Bucky had been angry at Steve before, obviously, but never like this. It had never been able to escalate to this level, where years of resentment and bitterness had been pushed down because he was ashamed of them, because he didn’t have an outlet. Him and Steve would get angry at each other, they’d yell, rough house a bit, and then it was over. It had never been able to fester. And when Steve was gone it had been easy to ignore it -- how could you be angry at a dead man? But now Steve was back, and Bucky didn’t know what to do with his feelings. Sam said he had a right to feel what he felt, but what kind of man got angry because his best friend died?

It was months before he got word of Steve, almost a year since the fight on the Helicarrier. Bucky had gotten an apartment, had decorated it the way he’d wanted to… he’d even given a goddamn press conference about what happened, albeit with Tony’s help. By the time the sketchbook arrived, he had finally stopped trending on Twitter. 

He knew Steve had personally hand delivered it because it was on his kitchen table in his locked apartment. It had a plain black cover, and the only reason he knew what it was is because it was almost the exact same sketchbook that Steve had used when they were young. They had had sketchbooks exactly like that one coming out of their asses. Steve had left them everywhere; in the bed, buried in the couch cushions. Bucky had opened the fridge once to find one sitting in there. He sat down at the table with shaking hands and stared at it the cover for a few minutes before he worked up the courage to open it. 

On the first page was printed “This book belongs to…” and a line beneath to write your name. The first name on the line, in a hand that might have been Steve’s if Steve was relearning how to write, was  _ The Asset.  _ Bucky swallowed back the bile that climbed up his throat. That name was scratched out, and underneath, in neater print, was written  _ Steve Rogers.  _

The first couple pages had clearly been drawn when Steve was in the first few days after breaking from HYDRA, when his mind was still jumbled and he didn’t know who he was. A lot of it was his surroundings, and the pencil had been pushed so hard into the paper that it had torn in places. Bucky ran his fingers over the harsh lines as his eyes looked over trees, houses, children playing, stray animals. There was one repeated drawing of a particular cat with only one eye that Steve must have taken quite a liking to. And mixed in with all the landscapes were half-finished faces that Steve must have been trying to pull from his memory; Bucky recognized the high cheekbones of Steve’s mother, the round face of the landlord’s wife and the dirty apron she always wore, Colonel Phillips’ stern eyes. And on almost every page, in many different forms of completion, were Bucky and Peggy. Bucky’s eyes floating by themselves, a pair of dark lips that could only have been Peggy’s, her hair cascading down. Sometimes, disturbingly, the pictures were scribbled over in dark pencil, and sometimes there were words written next to them. About a third into the sketchbook names started to appear:  _ Peggy -- my girl? Bucky -- “Captain America.” Dum Dum? Morty…...Morita??  _ And then a picture of Steve himself, the way he was now and, beside it, pulled from the mess of his memory, maybe, or perhaps the Smithsonian exhibit, was Steve before the serum, small and thin and perfect. 

And then he turned the page, and the final third of the book was just Bucky. Bucky the way he was now, Bucky from the 40s, Bucky in his Sergeant uniform, Bucky from the Helicarrier, beaten and bloody and bruised. Bucky in profile, Bucky from behind and above, as if Steve had been perched on some rooftop looking down at him. Words were scrawled in the spaces between pictures, like some brainstorm cloud of memories:  _ James Buchanan, Becca??, Boxing. Martin Hendriks?  _

Bucky laughed. Martin Hendriks had been the kid who had beat the shit out of him and Steve that fateful day they’d met. 

He flipped through the sketchbook multiple times over the next few days, until he had it memorized, every stroke of the pencil, every line and curve, every point where Steve had pushed too hard. He began to learn the different ways Steve drew -- the tentative strokes when he was sketching Peggy, the way his lines seemed to caress his mother’s face, the soft smile present in every picture. But the way he drew Bucky was always different, like Steve never quite knew what he was feeling about Bucky when he drew him. Sometimes they were all hard edges and dark lines, and then other times they were bright smiles and shining eyes. 

But Bucky’s favourite page was the one that Steve had drawn of himself. It was almost a perfect replication. Steve had not drawn it with any preconceived notion of who he was or should have been. It was the Steve that was real, the old one that existed in memories and museum exhibits and the new one. For all the times that Steve had been taken apart and put back together, he had found himself again, and Bucky couldn’t help but trace the lines on the page. Steve had always poured his confidence into his sketchbooks. How many times had Bucky done this exact same thing, flipping through the sketchbooks Steve had left lying around? Sitting in the kitchen, morning light filtering through their moth eaten curtains, studying the people and the things that had caught Steve’s attention. Bucky was always in them a lot, just based solely on the fact that Steve had nothing to look at most of the time except Bucky’s sorry face. 

God, what was he doing? His best friend had come back from the dead, had fought through hell, had clawed his way back up to the surface and what was Bucky doing? The awkwardness, the insecurity, the bitterness? He had been given a second chance and he was squandering it, throwing it away because he had had an identity crisis for a few years. Compared to what Steve had gone through? What Steve had suffered, when it should have been  _ Bucky  _ who had fallen off that train?

He wiped his face, surprised to find he had started crying. Wet spots specked Steve’s sketchbook and Bucky closed it hurriedly, afraid of spoiling it, of ruining the contents of Steve’s brain so lovingly spread out before him. 

He wished he had a way to contact Steve, someway to get his attention, but who knew where Steve even was? He could have left the state, or the country. Could have gone back to hunting down HYDRA camps. Maybe the sketchbook was his goodbye. 

That idea was so devastating that Bucky felt momentarily nauseous. The idea that he could have had gotten Steve back and ruined it was too much to even consider. 

He got up. He had to -- to do something, had to get out. He threw on a jacket and walked out the door, changed his mind, and doubled back to grab the sketchbook. He wanted to show it to Sam, get his opinion on whether this was goodbye or not. On whether Bucky had fucked it up, had ruined his chance to have his best friend back. 

* * *

He stayed at Sam’s for a few hours, got a decent breakdown in, clutched the sketchbook to his chest melodramatically, and then left. He was hoping that Steve had showed up while he was gone, that the universe had decided to throw him a bone for once, but his apartment was lonely and empty when he returned. 

It stayed lonely and empty for a couple weeks. Bucky had just accepted the fact that no matter what Sam said, Steve was gone for good. Why would he leave the sketchbook for Bucky and then not show up again? The sketchbook must have been his goodbye. 

Just as he had finally sort of started to accept this, he came home from the grocery store to find Steve sitting in his living room. He looked healthy and aware, even more so than the last time. His eyes were bright and he held himself with more confidence, but it was clear that he was still holding his trauma close to his chest. He also clearly didn’t know how to dress in the new millennium, if his two sizes too small t-shirt was any indication. Bucky supposed that it was better than the leather assassin outfit, but only slightly. 

Everything he had been thinking flew out of his head. All of the certainty, that Steve was back and that was all he needed, that there was no reason to be awkward, that he knew this man better than he knew anyone else, completely left his head. 

It was hard to imagine that the two of them used to be inseparable, that where one was the other was close behind. It was hard to remember the years before the war, where personal space didn’t exist between them, where Bucky would collapse onto Steve’s bed, where Steve would wear Bucky’s shirts around the house. The space between them now seemed complete impassable. The couple feet that lay between them might as well have been football fields. 

But they  _ weren’t,  _ were they? They were just a couple of feet. And compared to everything -- compared to a war, to a medical miracle, to thirty miles behind enemy lines, to a train and an open sky and seventy years in ice and hell -- what was a couple of feet?

Bucky smiled. It probably wasn’t as reassuring as he wanted, but it was a start. “I saw your sketchbook. It was… thank you. For showing me.”

Steve shoved his hands in his pockets. “There are a few memories that won’t… things I can’t remember. Would you help?”

“Of course,” Bucky said, too fast. “Do you want to sit?”

“No,” Steve said, eyes flicking around the room, like he was assessing exits. “You should, though.”

“Okay,” Bucky said. “Ask me whatever you need.”

Steve rubbed at his lips before shoving his hands back in his pockets. “My mother’s name. I can’t… was it Sandra?”

“Sarah,” Bucky said, smiling at the memory of Sarah Rogers, of her soft smile and quick temper and how she always pretended she didn’t see Bucky sneak into Steve’s room when he was sick. “Her name was Sarah. She was a wonderful woman.”

“I remember that,” Steve said, and he sounded almost guilty. “I remember the feelings, and her face, and her smile, but I couldn’t remember her name.”

“That’s okay,” Bucky said quietly, hoping Steve believed him. “The fact that you can remember anything is… the fact that you’re  _ here…”  _ He took a breath. He didn’t want to get overly emotional and scare Steve away. “I’m sorry. You were right, I was mad at you, and that -- it wasn’t fair.”

Steve shook his head. “You had a sister, right?”

Bucky nodded. “You were right. Her name was Becca. She was younger. Kind of a pain in the ass, really, but you were always good to her.”

Steve asked a couple more questions, mostly about names, and Bucky answered them to the best of his ability. Steve’s memory worked strange, sometimes; he couldn’t remember most names but he had an abnormal ability to recall faces, asking Bucky about the most random of people, like his third grade teacher or the two “cousins” who lived across from them. Bucky filled in a couple of details from during the war, too, but Steve seemed to have a better grasp on that part of his life, possibly due to the serum, somehow. Steve never sat down, but he did seem to relax the slightest bit, his shoulders relaxing as the time passed and Bucky filled in the holes in his memory. Bucky tried to apologize again, but Steve never acknowledged it. 

At a natural lull in the conversation, Bucky brought up something that had been at the back of his head for months. 

“When you said that Peggy wasn’t your girl… I just don’t want you remembering wrong. She was a damn good woman. I want you remembering right.”

Steve shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that, Buck.” The soft way he said it, the way he looked down, the way he said  _ Buck --  _ it felt like they were back in their old brownstone, before the war, before the serum, before anything happened, when they were still just Steve and Bucky and there was nothing else between them. “Sure I would’ve married Peggy -- would’ve been honoured to. I sure did love her. But I… well.” He laughed slightly. “I guess what I’m trying to say is I never jumped out of a train for her.”

Bucky’s heart stopped. He knew what he  _ wanted  _ Steve to be saying, but that didn’t mean that’s what he  _ was  _ saying. “You would’ve jumped out of a train for anyone of us.”

Now Steve really did laugh. “Well, sure, but -- you know what I’m trying to say.”

Bucky found he couldn’t quite meet Steve’s eyes, so he focused on his shoulder instead. “Your memory --”

“No,” Steve said severely. “Do you know what I’ve been doing for the past year?”

“Killing HYDRA agents?”

“That was just a hobby,” he said, and Bucky wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “I’ve been travelling. Remembering. Going to places I could remember and some I had never even heard of in the hope it would light some fire and give me a new name or face. And at the beginning I didn’t know who I was, all I knew was what HYDRA had told me, what they had put in my head, but I knew  _ you,  _ somehow. And at every place I went, in every memory, the one thing they all had in common was you. Even if you weren’t  _ there,  _ there was something I associated with you. Some gut feeling that reminded me of you. And God, I did love Peggy. But she wasn’t my girl. She couldn’t have been.”

“You calling me your girl, Rogers?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “I have been breaking into houses and practicing that speech for weeks, you jerk.”

Bucky smiled. It felt like the first genuine smile he had given anyone in decades. Steve still wouldn’t sit down, and he was situated so his back was to a corner of the room, and Bucky had a feeling he had any number of knives hidden on him. But he was here, and Bucky would do what he did a hundred times over if it always ended like this, Steve alive and them together. Steve smiled back, and even if it was a little more jagged than it used to be, Bucky would still recognize it anywhere. 

“Punk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the winter soldier, standing in some family's living room in front of their mirror: please stop cowering i'm not going to kill you i just want to know if this speech is okay

**Author's Note:**

> my twitter is @aravenlikea

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for: Footnote](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18074699) by [hey_you_with_the_face](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hey_you_with_the_face/pseuds/hey_you_with_the_face)
  * [who the hell is bucky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18129002) by [StarSpangled (Senforza)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senforza/pseuds/StarSpangled)




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